One of the more frequent questions that come up at IT Saviours is whether an old machine has had its day and if it's time to buy a new one. From our point of view the first thing we ask is why they feel they need a new PC and most of the time the answer is simply that it's running very slowly and they would like something a bit quicker.
However what most don't realise is that it's usually quite easy to get a bit more oomph out of an older machine by upgrading a few parts to bring it up to a more respectable level -- assuming that the problem is not virus or malware related. Mostly, older machines we see are running Windows XP, have 512mb of memory or less and have an old hard drive chugging away at the heart of the machine.
A simple and cheap upgrade is purely to add more memory into the machine, these days a 1gb memory module can be had for 10 to 20 pounds, takes two minutes to install and will most likely make a massive difference to the responsiveness of the machine.
This is because when a machine runs out of physical memory it starts to write to the hard drive instead, using it as Virtual Memory. This has the advantage of allowing the machine to run more programs as using the space available on the drive as "memory" however the real disadvantage is that the hard drive, compared to a proper memory module, is extremely slow.
So if you're out of physical memory, whenever you load a program it starts to "page" to the disk (another term for using the disk as memory) and because it's using the disk to load the program AND as a space to store data, its gets even slower still. As a result an upgrade to the memory is possibly one of the best upgrades to a machine with a small amount of memory you can make and as mentioned above, it's cheap.
Another option to be considered is a newer Hard Drive, whilst this won't have as great an impact as more memory, especially on systems with 1Gb or more, it will speed up loading times as newer hard drives are significantly faster than ones which were installed on machines that are several years old. There are a few things to consider here, ideally all your data should be moved to this disk and there are different socket types on the motherboard like SATA and IDE to consider, however your local computer repair shop will point you in the right direction here and be able to do the work for you.
Should you wish to spend a little extra, a SSD Hard Drive, can currently be had for around £80 for a 60GB drive. Whilst that may not seem like much space, these drives work extremely fast and will make a huge difference to any system, old or new. These work by having no moving parts, like traditional Hard Drives, instead they write to chips on the drive which has the ability to be wrote to and read from extremely quickly. Whilst these do cost more, these would make an excellent upgrade in any system.
If you compare the cost of extra memory and a newer hard drive over the cost of a new machine, you may find you could save some good money over a new machine, especially if you're only using it for e-mail, writing documents and surfing the web.
Laptop Repair Falkirk
Offering IT Support and computer repair and maintenance services as well as local friendly help and advice to Home and Business clients, we are your one stop shop for all your home laptop, pc or computer repairs and business IT needs. We are based in Central Scotland and cover Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, Falkirk and all areas in between.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=S_Alexander
No comments:
Post a Comment