Economical Upgrades for sub 1GHz CPU Mchines

Bring 2001's PCs up to date with some of these economical computer upgrades Those systems that you bought for the office in early 2001 have done well over the years. A thousand plus days of running time though and you can tell that they're no longer the mid range machines that they once were. Seven years ago 400MHz was top performance on an IntelP2 processor, five years ago and it was an Athlon 1Gig. Now it's around the 4 Gig mark. There is never an ideal time to buy a computer, least of all a whole batch of new ones for a small business. The cash outlay can be extremely prohibitive, even on a small network of six PCs. Furthermore, you can't expect machines over three years old to have any significant resale value. Can you really afford to replace the whole lot every three years or four years? The answer is probably no and yet you rely on them more and more in your daily business affairs. An easier way is to spend a little, frequently, on the upgrade of older machines and the gradual integration of new units. If you bought dedicated business machines around eighteen months ago chances are that they are Duron/Celeron based in the 700MHz-900MHz range. Fortunately for you millions of machines were shipped in that period, most incorporating similar components. Consequently many parts are interchangeable and there are a lot of them around at the moment. So what are the best ones to buy?

General - Older mice and keyboards certainly begin to feel tired and worn out. Keys stick, the pointer refuses to move; you will well know the symptoms. For under a tenner you can replace the pair of them with a new standard PS2 connection mouse and keyboard. It will avoid hours of accumulated office frustration.

CPUs - If you have a Socket A machine that happens to be built on a decent board like the ubiquitous Gigabyte GAIXE4 or the ABit KT-7 series these can take Athlon processors up to and above the 1GHz mark without complaint. If you had five plus machines with Duron chips that you wanted to upgrade to Athlon 1200s any good technician should be able to get you a trade in price on the surplus parts. Don't forget to budget for new fans aswell. For other types of board and processor you will need to see what it's maximum rated support is and then decide whether it is worth the cost for the extra speed.

Memory - RAM - Now is most definitely the season to buy RAM again. It is the one component that is incredibly volatile in price, a slave to the forces of supply and demand. Virtually all boards supplied in our age group of PCs take SDRAM (usually three slots) Virtually all boards will take 384MB (3x128MB) and some will take a lot more. At the moment prices for SDRAM are relatively cheap (ebaY is a great source as long as it's from reputable suppliers) It is well worth investing a few quid on some extra and is the easiest upgrade of all.

CDReWriters - If your non-networked machines haven't got them in then now would be a good time to think about getting some. Internal IDE connection burners are widely available from forty pounds each (including burning software), are a breeze for a technician or amateur to install and will provide you with an effective and economical back-up and data-transport facility.

Network Cards - Any standalone computers that need hooking up to a network can have Network Cards fitted at the same time as any of these upgrades. Standard 10/100Mbps cards cost just over ten pounds and require a free PCI slot. Again a relatively simple upgrade with drivers usually supplied on floppy

Hard Drives - Most PCs in this age range will have a minimum of 15GB hard drive space which is usually more than sufficient for business application software. However if you work in an environment that creates especially large files (such as graphic design) then you may want to consider boosting your hard drive storage space. It may be that you want to add more hard drives to a RAID enabled server for greater back-up. Storage costs now are cheaper than ever and you get more than two Gig of storage per pound at the moment with decent hard drives. 200 Gig of storage for 100 pounds. You must be capable of formatting a disk and installing an operating system and drivers before attempting this upgrade.

Others - For most business applications the rendering capabilities of the graphics are not particularly important when it comes down to Sage Line50 or Word. It may be the time for your engineer to have a look at any parts that may be developing faults but upgrades to sound and graphics will be dictated by specific situations. Graphics faults may actually point to problems that it is good to catch and repair early before it does any serious damage (eg: flaky voltage regulator in the power supply). Now is also the time to replace any broken bladed fans or gnarling floppy drives.

Once they've had a dust-out, and the lids are sealed back on, your software technicians can upgrade any operating systems / applications, install any new units and troubleshoot the network. As a business you haven't broken the bank AND you've got computers with a lot of service (and a little resale value) left in them

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