Any simple upgrade worth doing to this PC?

longwalks1

I bought the following PC tower 4 years ago, and wondered if theres any simple upgrades worth doing (Im a technophobe)


HP Pavilion 550-153na

i5-6400 8GB RAM

2TB hard drive
AMD Radeon R5330 graphics card.

tonyh66

the obvious SSD install would speed it up.

molerat

SSD
Clean OS install

sk240

Yeah i agree, a fresh OS install on an SSD (240GB available for around £25) would speed things up dramatically.


RAM is fine, but a graphics card upgrade may also help, but your limited by the 180w PSU so that probably wont work unless you upgrade that too.

El_Torro

What do you do with your PC?


If it's for gaming the processor is still pretty good so you could upgrade the RAM and graphics card and keep it going a bit longer.


If it's not for gaming or something equally intensive, then there's probably no need to bother upgrading.

DoaM

As per others, installing an SSD as the boot drive (and a clean install of the OS) will see the most noticeable improvement. You could use the HDD as a backup disk / user account file location.

mksysb

Put linux on it. xubuntu or majaro would run well on it and be faster than windows.

DoaM

mksysb wrote: »

Put linux on it. xubuntu or majaro would run well on it and be faster than windows.

:spam:

Are you also going to pay for any software the OP has bought (e.g. games) so that they run seamlessly in Linux?

mksysb

DoaM wrote: »

:spam:

Are you also going to pay for any software the OP has bought (e.g. games) so that they run seamlessly in Linux?

There is no mention of what software he is running in the OP. Linux has plenty of free software which is as good as the paid for software. LibreOffice, Chrome, Firefox, GIMP, darkatable, audacity, openshot, shotwell, inkscape to name a few. This is a money saving site and you can't do better than free.

Maverock

mksysb wrote: »

Put linux on it. xubuntu or majaro would run well on it and be faster than windows.

He say's that he is a 'technophobe' so not really a good idea.

A.Penny.Saved

An SSD would help but that would need to be fitted and an OS re-install would be needed unless you go for a transfer which is not the best option.

A new graphics card which supports HEVC/H.265 assisted decoding might be a good idea because Hi-Def HEVC can be very CPU intensive. My system struggles with anything over 720p HEVC but I do intend to upgrade to a nVidia GTX 1660 hopefully during Black Friday Sales if I can find a decent card. For basic decoding assistance you wouldn't need to spend as much as me ~£200.

If he is as much a technophobe as he suggests things could go pear shaped so someone would be needed to do the job. That is unless he has another way of accessing the internet without that PC.