Getting a Couple More Years Out of Your Old PCs

Getting a Couple More Years Out of Your Old PCs – January 2009

One way to deal with the tough economic times is to extend the useful life of your existing computers.  People buy new equipment for a variant of reasons including: speed problems, hardware failure, need for more storage space and adding a new employee.  This article addresses each of these issues.

Speeding Up Your PC

Remove Unused Programs – go to Add/Remove programs in the control panel and get rid of any unused programs.  Make sure you know what you are uninstalling and that you have the media for the program in case you change your mind.

Run Updated Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware software – infection from viruses, spyware and adware is the most common cause of a slow computer.  Make sure your Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware is set to update and scan at an off hour.  We recommend the AVG Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware products.

Upgrade RAM – RAM is cheap and can have a huge impact on the speed of a PC.  If you have less than 1GB of RAM, this may be a good choice.  To check the amount of RAM in your PC, go to the System icon in the Control panel and select the General tab.

Windows should be set to automatically download Critical Window updates to keep your system running smoothly and protected against viruses.

If you have a computer running Windows XP read our newsletter titled “Speeding Up Your Windows Computer” by clicking here.

Hardware Failure

Be prepared for a disaster.  If your hard drive fails and you do not have a mirrored backup of both the data and programs, it may take hours of expensive time to reload programs and data.  You could lose days of productivity.  In the worse case situation, you could lose years of data.  (Read the Newsletter titled “Backup Your Computers”.)

If a component fails, get your consultant to do a cost comparison between fixing the old computer and buying a new one.  The price of desktop computers is way down, so it may not be wise to spend too much on an old machine.

Expanding Storage Space

Large capacity hard drives are really inexpensive and simply plug into an USB port.  A 500GB external hard drive is about $200.

If you want everyone on your network to have access to the new storage a technology called Network Attached Storage (NAS) can be employed.  With NAS you can better manage your hard disk space by limiting access for certain users and by assigning read only or read and write privileges.

Need for an additional computer

Determine how the computer will be used.  Your consultant can help you select the best priced machine to meet those needs so that you do not pay for more power than you need or buy a computer that is not powerful enough for future needs.

Get your consultant to evaluate all your computer resources to see if those resources can be reallocated to save money.

Ask your consultant about new technologies such as NComputing’s new thin client that allows several users to share a computer requiring only the purchase of a monitor, keyboard and mouse for additional users.

Technical Stuff that can be done by your consultant

There are many things your consultant can do to improve the speed of your machine.  These include: disabling unused Windows services, tweaking and cleaning the registry, defragmenting the hard drive and updating the BIOS and third-party application drivers and making sure the associated settings are optimized.