will old GPU and drivers contribute to PC slowness?

I have a friend who has an older PC with a Geforce 5200( i've read that this GPU is a real dog!), running on a P4 3.0GHZ and a Widescreen monitor. Would updating the GPU and the drivers help speed it up possibly? I have an old P4 in my basement that is no where near that slow. It has a P4 2.6GHZ and a ATI 1300 GPU I believe.

Besides RAM, adding graphics horsepower is the best way (in terms of bang for the money) to improve performance. And in today's graphics oriented world, the more capable the graphics solution, the better the improvements in over all computer performance. BUT - a word of caution - a good graphics card can easily require more power than a CPU. So whenever considering upgrading graphics, you must be prepared to upgrade the power supply too.

I am surprised at some of these old threads that kind of die without a resolution. I just joined the forum today and feel like adding my 3 cents. I think it depends on what you want to do with this machine, streaming video, gaming, reading online news articles etc We don't know what you want to accomplish. Simply upgrading the graphics may not accomplish what you want. I am not knowledgeable on the relative position of graphics cards. I have a GeForce GT 220 1Gb card. $30.00 bucks. Good deal?? It ain't the greatest. Do the basics if you haven't already, defrag the HD, get rid of the junk on the HD, maybe reformat and start over. I am only guessing. One final thought, if all you want is to stream video on that widescreen monitor be aware that most video out there seems to be "FLASH" and flash does NOT use your video card ( it has very limited support ). Upgrading the video card will not matter if this is what you intend.