If you have an old computer that’s getting slow, it’s awfully tempting to buy a shiny new machine, but it’s not always the smartest thing to do.
PC World’s Brian Nadel explains how he spent just $125 to upgrade a five-year-old laptop.
Essentially, he added more RAM, installed a new hard-drive, fixed a broken keyboard, cleaned off five years of gunk and did some repairs of the file system and software.
All told, the hardware and software changes I performed to revive my R50 yielded a 30% gain in performance based on Futuremark’s PCMark 05 benchmark.
More to the point, the fan now works properly, so the system doesn’t shut down on its own. It’s clean, and I’m no longer ashamed to use it in public. Not bad for an hour’s work and about $125.
The last three steps only work if you’ve been a very irresponsible computer owner and done zero cleaning or maitenance on your machine.
But the first two steps — adding RAM and a better hard drive — will indeed make big improvements to an older machine.
If your computer is only two or three years old (and was pretty good to start with) even a power user might be able to put off a new computer for another year or two.
That said, you can’t work miracles with RAM alone. The machine you’d get today for $900 isn’t just 30 percent faster than what you got five years ago. It’s several times faster.
For people who just use their computers for word processing, e-mail and Web surfing, it probably won’t matter much (unless you watch a lot of online video) but it’s not really honest for Nadel to imply that his $125 investment got him anything that resembles a new computer.
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