Buy New, or Upgrade?

Which way do you go?

This week I had a client (whom I'll call "Joe") who has a diagnostic device that requires a serial port on a computer to plug into. For a long time he had been using a Compaq laptop, circa 2004, which had, as many laptops of the day, a serial port.

Well, Joe's laptop has definitely seen better days. The battery was toast and the hard drive was just about shot, but salvageable. It could use more ram too at only 768 megs. Adequate, but not great.

At this point, Joe is asking what it costs to replace all this stuff and I do a quick check and it would normally be well over 3 or 4 hundred dollars with labour and taxes. He figures he could put that money into a new machine instead of fixing up the old one. But a new one could be $600 and up after all is said and done. Then a person would need to purchase some sort of adaptor to turn USB into a Serial port. Unfortunately, there are potential issues with these adaptors and not ALL serial port devices will work through them. There was a chance Joe could spend several hundred dollars getting a new maching, only to find out later his usb/serial device works but it sometimes is flaky or inaccurate, or slow, or stops responding.

To upgrade, a new 160 gig drive to replace the 40 gig is about 80 bucks or so. As for a new battery, I called one place and they wanted $178!!!! I was a bit shocked. I called another place and was able to get one sent to me for about $80. Pretty good deal compared to the first quote, that's for sure. To max out the ram on that laptop would be about 130 bucks and bring it up to two gigs of ram. Great for Windows XP.

Since Joe didn't have much money we decided to upgrade, but not everything; just the hard drive and battery. These are the two most critical things. The ram can wait. So we ghosted over his old drive to a new one and replaced the battery, and now it runs like it was new. Joe is happy.

If Joe is happy, I'M happy.

Things that make ya go "hunh?!?"

Recently I worked on a machine that was giving me a false message. It was telling me on boot up that the bios needed to be updated and was asking me to insert either a cd with the xxxx.rom file or a usb drive with the same.

After a lot of time spend trying to "please the machine" by running bios updates in various ways, it became apparent that the real problem lay elsewhere. I removed all the pci cards and powered up. No change. There were four sticks of ram; I removed two of them them and powered up. Hey, it booted! Something with the ram. After trying various combinations I was able to determine which of the four was the problem.

This is kinda like your car stalling with a message on the dash saying you're out of gas. But then you get out and see you have a flat tire. You fix the tire and suddenly the low fuel light goes out.

Sometimes things aren't always what they seem when fixing pc's.

Custom Building a Computer

If you are a small business and you need a computer to do a particular task, it might be a good idea to consult someone (such as myself) to see what sort of parts would make a good machine for your particular needs.

For example, if you wanted to edit video, you would need a much more powerful machine with higher end parts than you would to, say, create spread sheets or type a newsletter. Or if you were a serious hardcore gamer and had a really huge budget, you would want to build a better machine than what it would take to, say, surf the web and play your favourite movie on dvd.

But you know what? You don't need to be a computer whiz with years of experience to know what you want in a new computer for your specific needs. The hard part is deciding which way to play with numbers so you get the best bang for your hard-earned buck.

Here are a few pointers you may find helpful.

1. If you are into editing pictures with Photoshop, believe it or not, you do not need a high-end video card. What you need is lots of RAM power, rather than video power. So there's no need to spend a bunch of money for a video card unless you're doing something with video files or you're a gamer.

2. If you want to build a decent gaming machine, don't cheap out on the power supply; get a really decent one. If you buy a cheap one you're just looking for trouble. Remember that clean power is what your machine really likes. The power coming into your home is not "clean" power, meaning there are constant spikes and dips and noise on the powerlines. Having a battery backup power supply (or UPS) will clean the power for you so your power supply doesn't have to. Now, I say this about gaming machines, but really, my advice is to stay away from cheap, light power supplies altogether unless it's just an emergency temporary fix.

3. Don't worry about maxing out the ram on your motherboard. Just get what you can for now and fill in the rest or upgrade later. Just because your motherboard is capable of supporting 24gigs of RAM doesn't mean you have to make it full from the start.

4. Make sure the front side bus (or FSB) matches or exceeds the speed of your RAM. RAM will typically get faster and cheaper so you can fill up later. For now, however, it would be okay to get a motherboard with 1333MHz FSB and DDR3 RAM at 1333MHz. It would also be okay if your FSB was 2000MHz and your RAM was 1333 as this would still work well and you could always upgrade the ram later. It's not so easy to upgrade the motherboard.

5. Look for the "sweet spot" when it comes to getting the best bang for your buck with your CPU. For example, you could buy an Intel Core i5 2.8GHz for $173. But right next to it is the Intel Core i5 3.1GHz for $177. It's a "no-brainer." Spend the extra 4 bucks.

6. Harddrives. Have you noticed that some brand names of hdd's are using colours to designate various designs now? For example, Western Digital sells "blue" drives, "green" drives, and "black" drives. What's the difference? Speed. The Green drives are spinning at 5400 rpm while the Black drives are spinning at 7200 rpm. Black drives are almost twice the price of Green drives at the moment. If you can afford it, go with the Black drives. If you need a "value" machine, go Green.

As I mentioned, playing with the numbers is the harder part of building a new machine. In general, I usually spend the most money on motherboard, CPU, tower and power supply. The other stuff I don't mind "cheaping out" on like the DVD burner or card reader. Personally, I like spending a bit more on a nice case rather than just a ho-hum run-of-the-mill tower that everyone else has. But that's just me. Some people don't give a dang about how their case looks, just so long as everything fits.

Hope that helps.