Whether or not to repair or upgrade your computer may be a hard decision for you, if you are not informed. I
will give you some advice and information to help you make the correct decision. These suggestions and advice are strictly from
my own experiences. My observations and experiences may or may not agree with the advice given to you by someone else. I take no responsibility for your decisions.
Let’s start with your computer case. If you have the AT type of case, you should not spend a lot of money on that computer. Design
changes in the "shape" of motherboards have made that type of case virtually obsolete. There are only a few motherboards on the
market that will actually fit, correctly, into that case! The motherboards that "fit" are usually lower end boards that will not support
fast processors.
For $40 to $100 you can buy a new
ATX case w/300W powersupply that will accommodate the very latest motherboards! The motherboard is your computer!!
A Pentium class computer is the minimum recommended computer you should consider for an upgrade. That is the industry
standard for an upgrade. Personally I think that anything slower than 233MH should not be upgraded. Furthermore, a computer that
slow is not going to speed up noticeably even if you install a new processor! The best advice I can give you on how to improve the
performance of any computer, is to install the maximum RAM memory supported by your motherboard!!
Be careful with your upgrades to that computer you paid $500 for. They have inferior motherboards with few expansion possibilities,
if any. Those boards have the audio, video and
other components intergraded right into the motherboard. While they work very well, if you do encounter a problem, such as loss
of audio, the motherboard must be replaced.
Don't be afraid to buy good CD drives, hard drives and PCI cards for your old system. You can always use them in a new system.
If your operating system is 3.1 and original, you should be concerned with not only your hardware but also finding programs that
will work in that operating system. You should have upgraded long ago! If your system won’t support Windows95, throw it away!
That’s all for now. I will add more later…let me think!! You can obtain more info on this subject by reading my article on "Custom
Built" computers by clicking here.
Have A Nice Day!
Boog
BCI Computer
Lexmark Z52 Printer
