 You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
I have an 8 year old desktop PC.
It's starting to get noticeably slower than it used to be. Biggest concern is that the hard drive seems to be working more than I would expect, particularly at start up. It was windows 7 and now on windows 10. It should be up to the jobs I ask of it - home office type stuff and then internet browsing and streaming.
I looked at the spec:
Intel Core i5 4570
8GB PC3-10666 1333MHz DDR3 Memory (2 x 4GB sticks)
1000GB 7200RPM Hard Disk - 6Gbps
If I wanted to get it working a bit better and improve performance what are the options.
Back in the days of windows 98, I know reinstalling windows on a regular basis did wonders for performance. Is it likely to be a software clutter issue? There's loads of space on the hard drive and not a huge amount of programs running on startup or in the back ground.
Do hard drives age and get slower? Would and SSD be a cheap option that would be easy to do myself and effective at speeding it up?
Or more memory?
Would and SSD be a cheap option that would be easy to do myself and effective at speeding it up?
An SSD will make a world of difference.
SSD + some more ram (if you want)
Will make a considerable difference.
One of my pc's is the same age and spec. It's really helped to do a reinstall. Much quicker now.
Again, a fresh reinstall from scratch and an SSD will make a world of difference. Regarding RAM it would be worth checking first what your motherboard can support but I can't see 8GB as being insufficient.
Might be worth having a look inside and seeing if any dust bunnies need evicting, that's a proper performance killer!
Sorted the dust just now. Cores were running at 65C+ Paint brush and Schwalbe tyre booster treatment and we are now maxing out at 40C!
It already feels better.
Will look at and SSD - seems relatively cheap and simple.
we had a similarly aged laptop. Never used it, despite upgrading the RAM and changing to an SSD
I put on Chrome OS, using cloudready (actually using an HDD we had lying around). Amazing difference, even with the HDD. And if all you're going to do is office work and t'internet, it'll be fine. And, if we ever want anythingon the old SsD and OS, just flip it back and start up the PC
ssd will be transformative as a boot drive alone (ditch the cd player if it has one and put the SSD in there.). If after that, and you use alot of applications at the same time, upgrade the ram to 16gb.
Nobody needs 16Gb for that.
Okay, okay, I have 16Gb in the PC and 12Gb in the laptop, the former was built for gaming and the latter has 4Gb soldered on board (8Gb SODIMM was cheaper than 4Gb).
My old PC had 8Gb and was absolutely fine.
RAM isn't cheap right now, stick with the SSD and then see where you go from there.
Crucial BX100 is cheap from BTShop, have one in the laptop and another in the old computer. PCPartpicker is good for a quick comparison (but they don't cover everyone).
Similar added an ssd and put stuff that gets heavy use on it not a lot of money as find using pc less and less and if hadn't been fed up in past with on line services shutting down pretty sure if dies won't replace