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

BillScarab

The problem with replacing a motherboard on an older PC s finding a new one that will take all of the old components that you want to re-use, also you will usually need to re-install the OS so it can turn into a big job.

superscaper

I wasn't meant to imply i my earlier post that it would be a "ten minute" job or anything. It can take a full day etc depending on what needs to be done, but if you follow everything though logically one step at a time it's not that complicated. Something like the Asrock 4coredual motherboard is a modern one that should also be compatible with just about everything in an old system.

[Deleted User]

Don't a lot of new PCs (the likes from Dell) come with discs that will let you reinstall the OS from scratch easily?

It's a shame they don't just come with a nice and easy disk image on a DVD you can reset your PC with

Cerro

Yes, if Dunkyboy's PC is old then its unlikely that the graphics card will be PCI-Express, more likely it is AGP - making it useless. Alternative is onboard graphics (urgh - please don't) or buying a new one. When you put a motherboard, cpu, ram and graphics card together that is effectively a whole new PC. Most new motherboards come with only one IDE port, so you can have only 2 IDE devices and you don't want a hard disk and optical drive on the same ribbon - so you move to sata (again ditching old parts like hard disks and cd/dvd-drives). That leaves you with PCI devices, sound card, tv tuner and network card, the case and the PSU. The PSU will probably be too old to handle the power requirements and rail voltages of a new PC, so bin that too... not a whole lot left there is there? If someone had asked me this 6-12 months ago, I would said yes, upgrade. Right now, I'd say buy a cheap one.

The last two years have brought so many changes in form factors and standards (such as the ram issue i pointed out earlier, AGP/PCI-Express and 32/64bit processing) that any PC built over a year ago is now being phased out. The pace of change in technology at the moment is so fast I even struggle to keep up with it. We will soon have dedicated physics cards in computers for games - in fact they already exist, just few games take advantage of them.

The best way to restore your system is to ghost image it and restore that image every year or so - or whenever you have a significatant slow down. Have the important data that you don't want to lose on a seperate hard disk or partition (at least). That way, you can just reimage your PC and restore the basic windows install with all the basic applications ready to go - no loss of data, no additional configuration. Want to update your image? Just make a new one... Quick and easy way to do it and anyone can do it! Plenty of programs out there that will automate the entire process, just stick in the CD/DVD of your image and away you go. I use Norton Ghost, but as wolfman mention there is also True Image and i'm sure there are loads more.

superscaper

Cerro wrote: »

Yes, if Dunkyboy's PC is old then its unlikely that the graphics card will be PCI-Express, more likely it is AGP - making it useless. Most new motherboards come with only one IDE port, so you can have only 2 IDE devices and you don't want a hard disk and optical drive on the same ribbon - so you move to sata (again ditching old parts like hard disks and cd/dvd-drives). (such as the ram issue i pointed out earlier, AGP/PCI-Express and 32/64bit processing) that any PC built over a year ago is now being phased out. The pace of change in technology at the moment is so fast I even struggle to keep up with it

That's why I suggested the motherboard I did, you can upgrade to the newer standards when you want to rather than all at once, eg, keep using AGP card now and upgrade to PCI Express card when you have the budget to, same with DDR and DDR2, 2 IDE connectors and 2 SATA connectors etc.

BillScarab

"Yes, if Dunkyboy's PC is old then its unlikely that the graphics card will be PCI-Express, more likely it is AGP - making it useless."

AGP hardly makes it useless Valve have been doing surveys of gamers who use their steam service and approximately 40% of them are still using AGP, only 51% are using PCI-E 16x. Also things like DDR and DDR2 memory will be available for a while yet. Crucial are still selling new SDRAM.

Using a ghost image is definately the way to go for restoring though, saves downloading lots of drivers and installing the apps you do actually need. Also have to agree on separate partitions/discs for data and OS. In fact at work we build all our windows servers with four partitions, one for OS, one for Applications, one for data and one for the ghost image.

Link to Valve's steam user survey.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

[Deleted User]

skintmostofthetime wrote: »

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

To put it in normal speak
- dont go to PC world and waste £1000, the computer you have got already does everything you could ever want.
- if its slow find a step by step guide on the internet to refreshing your computer, including how to optimise windows setting, how to "defragment" a hard disk and possibly how to optimise "BIOS" settings. If you have the original windows disk, blanking the computer and putting windows in again may help.
- If you really must buy a new computer dont spend more teh £250 on it, lots of good internet places.

Cerro

There are quite a few drawbacks to using that board - the main one is the performance hit. It is a budget board so you get what you pay for but even then, do you really want to upgrade only to get marginal improvement in performance? Then you've got a limit of 2 sata ports - I use 6, granted i'm not the average user but I can see them needing 4 sata ports pretty easily. Its a nice board and for those who just want the option of using newer stuff, its fine but its not going to improve things a whole lot - which is the idea of upgrading. Sure you could spend abit more and get better components and ensure an increase in performance but then, that would kinda defeat the purpose of the motherboard - save money. I'd also argue against using a non-intel chipset based motherboard, both from a support and performance point of view.

AGP isn't completely useless but its not got alot of life left in it. I know lots of people still have AGP - few see the need to upgrade to PCI-Express, at least while they can still get good cards using AGP. But it is coming to an end, the cards produced are no longer like-for-like and while there are going to be DX10 AGP cards, they won't be cutting edge, so would it be worth the money buying one when you can go to PCI-Express and get a better card that will last? Same goes for DDR ram, there are very few sticks which come in 1Gb sizes, so most are stuck with 4x512Mb sticks at best. Thats assuming the motherboard can handle it. DDR2 will of course be around for a good while yet as DDR3 has only just appeared but the switch has already started.

Couple months from now and a new generation of quad core processors will appear - using slightly different architecture to what is currently in use, so to make the step up, PCs built now will probably need an updated motherboard chipset. And so it goes...

BillScarab

I agree with most of what your saying but we're not talking gamers here, just general users who just want to surf the net and send emails. Older technology is fine for them, it's just a matter of good housekeeping to keep things runnign smoothly and minor upgrades where necessary. PC technology is always evolving but most people don't need to keep up with it.

BTW Crucial still sell 2gb and 1gb sticks of DDR RAM if anyone with an older board needs to upgrade the RAM.

There's always ebay for second hand parts as well, for upgrading on the cheap.

But back to the original point, you can significantly improve the performance of your PC by doing some housekeeping and getting rid of a lot of the rubbish on there. Tools like ccleaner, autoruns, bootvis etc. can all help speed it up.

mjr600

Rather than continue to labour the point about motherboards which I think we should just accept it is a step beyond 'a spring clean' and a further step beyond slotting in some new memory or a new graphics card shall we just put that to bed and come back to the simpler stuff, properly explained for the everyday user.

Does anyone else have a simple suggestion for rejuvenating an older PC, if not I'll post another up later today.