Why buy a new PC ? Spring clean and update the old one.

mjr600

This forum always has lots of posts about the best new PC buys and what one should look for when making a new computer purchase and I have answered quite a number.

Decent computers can be had for less than £200 now, laptops from less than £300 and so dawns the era of the throwaway PC.

Lots of decent computers retired just to have the latest quad core processor when the owner really only uses the internet, stores photos and looks at his neighbours garden on Google Earth.

There are few applications which demand Dual or Quad Core CPUs, video can be pulled from camcorders and burnt to dvd on a 5yr old P4 without a problem, MP3 conversion requires even less power, photo manipulation is equally easy if you use the correct software.

Most heavy games users have migrated to 360 or PS3 although for those still on the PC I accept this thread is not relevant to you but gaming PCs is still a 'mine is better than yours' situation.

So, if you have an PC which is a few years old and it seems slow, don't just dismiss it for a new purchase. With some new memory, a reinstalled o/s and a used graphics card off Ebay an old PC can be transformed for less than £50. I can assure you that just backing up your data and reinstalling XP will make the computer feel so much faster.

A common problem with older computers is that they have built up errors which have reset the hard drive to the ultra slow PIO mode, just setting this back to the much faster Ultra DMA is enough for a lot of users to realise the computer is just fine for their needs.

This post may vanish into the forum ether but if you are considering a new purchase ask for advice on here to get the most from your old one first. It is a moneysaving website after all.

BillScarab

I'd agree with all of the above except for

"Most heavy games users have migrated to 360 or PS3" I'd stake a fairly large some that there are still more people playing games on PC's than on consoles. After all there are a lot of games which are not available for consoles that you can only play on PC's.

niceguyrichy

largely good, sound advice
but:

mjr600 wrote: »

but gaming PCs is still a 'mine is better than yours' situation.

take at look at the minimum required specs for games like GRAW2, it's not always all about bragging rights, trust me

[Deleted User]

I must say, my Dell Outlet PC is kick ar5e for the money - 280 quid with dual core athlons, 1gb of ram and a reasonable little 128mb graphics card, all inside a nice small case. I see it having a good 3 - 4 year lifespan.

It does really annoy me the way people overspec home PCs. I've grown up with PCs at home ever since the early 80s, so I know that if I wanted to do just word processing, i could get by on Windows XP running on a 4 year old PC. People never do a proper 'spring clean' and reformat, reinstall the OS and only reinstall the apps you use. This is worth doing every 18 months - 2 years. If you have kids, i'd do that every 6 months to a year. Think of it as an oil change for your PC

Most important thing in a new PC? RAM - make sure you've got a gig and it'll stop windows thrashing your hard disk as much. This, in my opinion, is worth far more than having a faster processor. You can now buy cheap 'external expansion hard disk space', so you don't have to worry so much about upgrading smaller hard disks.

Sigh, I remember when ripping a CD to mp3 took about an hour
</retro lecture>

Mercenary

mjr600 wrote:

Most heavy games users have migrated to 360 or PS3 ...

Not on your life! Keyboard and mouse all the way and with no dumbing-down ('consolisation') of the actual games either :cool:.

mjr600 wrote:

...gaming PCs is still a 'mine is better than yours' situation.

No it isn't. It's entirely in order to play at a reasonable balance of graphics and performance. Have you seen the specs for the forthcoming game Crysis? :eek: .

mjr600

Ok gamers, ignore the thread, stop posting and leave it for the normal users.

Nothing to see here.

Cerro

Mercenary wrote: »

Not on your life! Keyboard and mouse all the way and with no dumbing-down ('consolisation') of the actual games either.

No it isn't. It's entirely in order to play at a reasonable balance of graphics and performance. Have you seen the specs for the forthcoming game Crysis?

+1

I don't even own a console! Only one i'd consider owning is a Wii. Because it has something my PC cannot do - PS3/360 are just simplified PCs for those who just want to stick in a DVD and play.

Ringo is right about the ram - though i'd say with Vista you need 2Gigs to run everything smoothly. But with new ram appearing and old ram being phased out, there is only so much upgrading you can do. RDRam, DDR SDRam and now DDR2 SDRam are all/have all been phased out. So its not always possible to upgrade it - in which case buying a cheap new one is your best option.

Reinstalling the OS is also beyond most non-techie people, half of them wouldn't know where to start and wouldn't be keen to try because they don't understand what to keep or how to get it back to "how it was". Not that means you should simply throw away your PC for a new one. Everyone should learn how to backup & restore data. Investing in something like Norton Ghost will make the process vastly less painful.

Zagu

My old PC started to crash badly, and as it was a few years old, decided to buy a new one. When all the parts had arrived, I put them together, only to get intermittent crashes. Im now in a very long winded dispute with the supplier about the motherboard, which is very difficult as its a very intermittent fault. In the mean time, I took apart my old PC, cleaned it up, removed the CPU cooler only to find that there was enough dirt to grow potatoes stuck in it, reassembled, reinstalled W2K, and am still using it now, while I have a nice collection of expensive parts in boxes doing nothing.

People do overspec PCs for no reason. Unless you really want to play the latest games in high definition, any PC made over the past few years will do what 90% of what people want with no problem. Its like people asking which car they should buy to pop down the shops once a week, and being told to buy a TVR.

Mercenary

mjr600 wrote: »

Ok gamers, ignore the thread, stop posting and leave it for the normal users.

Nothing to see here.

Pax

mjr600

OK lets start with what for normal user may be technically difficult to understand but is easy to fix.

You have an older PC and accessing data from the hard drive takes ages and the drive spins a lot.

As I originally mentioned you may have some errors which have defaulted the drive back to 'PIO' slow mode from 'Ultra DMA' fast mode.

To check do this...

Start
Right click My Computer
Properties
Hardware
Device Manager
Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Double click Primary IDE channel
Advanced settings
Make sure that in the Device box it says 'DMA if available'
If it doesn't select it shut it all down and reboot.
If it doesn't give you the option run the below file, follow the instructions
reboot and go back to the top of this list

http://winhlp.com/tools/resetdma.vbs

When the disk runs properly, the PC runs quicker.

skintmostofthetime

All comments welcome but the best ones are those that actually HELP us poor souls who don't really know what we're doing!