Is it worth upgrading - What cables

donny-gal

I have a tower PC, about 5-6 years old, a good spec when I bought it, but as we all know time moves on. Maxed on out Memory, and HDD space available, but frustrates me as it is slow, and no USB 3.0 slots (an easy fix I know).
To upgrade it I would need to start from scratch with motherboard, graphics card, etc., so I am not at all phased by doing it, done enough upgrades over the years, and enough there are enough youtube tutorials about, plus I can always pick your brains .
The question is, is it worth it, and what would you recommend?
Thanks
DG

Mr_Toad

I'm sure someone who knows will be along soon but I used to do all my own upgrades years ago.

On one occasion I was, like you, looking to upgrade and had started to price up the bits on-line.

Instead of finding loads of bargains parts what I found was a lot of on-line retailers selling brand new bare bones systems, no monitor, OS or keyboard etc., for about the same price as I could buy the bits for.

In the end I decided it was easier to buy one of these systems than upgrade my old one. It came with 12 months guarantee, all the bits worked when together in a system. An example of the benefits of bulk purchasing.

Things like RAM upgrades or a new HDD is always a self upgrade job but back then a keep the case and replace everything else upgrade was different.

Things may have changed, the only way to find out is to price up the parts then compare that to the cost of a similar spec bare bones system and don't forget to factor in you time for the build, not so important if you have lots of free time though.

GunJack

Whoa, whoa, whoa.... before you start off, what spec is the machine currently? No point in talking about upgrades, especially from scratch, without knowing the baseline and intended use

closed

time moves on, but machine hardware doesn't get any slower, it will be as fast as it's always been if you backup and reinstall windows, there is nothing wrong with this spec, and 4GB of ram is probably sat there doing very little, so doesn't need upgrading.

System Manufacturer: MEDIONPC
System Model: MS-7502
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 4094MB RAM


Unless you are transferring terabytes of data to external drives on a daily basis usb3 isn't essential at all, usb 2 is still fast.

if your hd is really full, use ccleaner and wiztree to tidy it up.

donny-gal

http://www.pocket-lint.com/review/69884-medion-md8828-multimedia-desktop-pc-review

The only hardware problem is the TV card is not responding since I upgraded it to Window 7, don't really want to go back to Vista, as my laptop is Windows 7, and like to keep things simple.

I think Windows 7 may be taking it to its limit, but I may be wrong. There is loads of HDD space, as there is a slot for an ext hdd and keep the majority of my data on that and not the internal one. I have ccleaned it, and limited the start up programs too.

Its older than I thought too!! Dec 2007. DG

closed

2007 isn't old.

It may be the fashion to throw out and replace gadgets after 2-3 years or less nowadays, but there is nothing wrong with the spec of that machine, and it will run W7 easily

If you have a problem with the tv card driver for W7 or tv software, it's not really a reason to throw it away, search for newer drivers.

Storing only copies of important data on external drives is a dangerous habit, they fail sometimes too. It's better to use externals for backup.

You said in the first post it was slow,, if it is you probably have a software problem causing that, not a hardware problem.

GunJack

closed wrote: »

System Manufacturer: MEDIONPC
System Model: MS-7502
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 4094MB RAM

jeez, if that's the spec of your machine, can I have it please? The hardware there is much better spec than anything I've got, so there shouldn't be any problems at all once it's been properly cleaned up

Oh, and try the vista driver for the TV card, by installing it without using the Found Hardware wizard, and it'll probably work... same with my old belkin wifi dongle

rum1

Ill have it as well. You just need to search for the tv drivers that pc has a decent spec and i dont think its worth throwing away

OGR

Replace the HDD with an SSD, thing will run like a new PC.

Core 2 duo and 4GB RAM, still pretty good, the HDD is probably holding it back in a lot of cases and causing a lot of the slowness.

S0litaire

Depends on what you use the PC for.

You can get a SSD to speed up general boot and loading programs.

If it's office work then a SSD will speed things up but if you're feeling adventurous you might be able to get a faster CPU and replace the Core2Duo, but it depends on the "socket" type the CPU uses.

If it's for games or media then getting any half decent graphics card will speed movie playback or gaming a lot.

I_have_spoken

SSD boot disk will certainly be helpful
Can you overclock? The E6750 should be OK for 3.2Ghz
Keep in the LGA 775 family, but swap the E6750 to something like a Core 2 Quad Q9550 which would be about £65 second hand.