June 26, 2010
Crucial Computer system Updates
The purchase of a brand-new Computer system is an important decision in this hugely wired, electronic age of ours. Even before you’ve even brought it home and out of the box, something hotter and faster has hit the market. It makes sense to do a bit of forward planning and get a computer that can remain important and capable with respect to your individual needs for at least some time. Besides the proper attention and servicing, improvements exist that will increase the lifetime of your system. These include things like upgrading the CPU, memory, graphics card and more.
The first and most critical upgrade for any PC is Random Access Memory. Nothing raises performance like adding all the RAM that the PC can handle. Just be conscious that 32-bit operating systems can only address 4 GB of memory, so if you would like to go further than that you’ll need to change to a 64-bit platform. Another fairly easy update is the Graphics Card. They’re a breeze to set up as they simply plug into any PCI Express slot on the motherboard and can considerably boost media and graphics rendering.
In addition, altering the original hard drive to something faster with a lot more space is a usually a great idea as hard drives or HDDs are relatively cheap these days. Set up kits with all the required gear to upgrade are available through a wide range of suppliers such as Seagate, Western Digital and OCZ. Though currently much more expensive than traditional disk drives, solid state drives have the advantage of using a smaller amount power, being less noisy and faster, as well as being more shock resistant. While you’re fiddling with the hard drive, you might also consider grabbing a Blu-ray player for media. They’re not that costly and can be had for £100 or so.
If you have made the decision to up grade to a brand-new, more powerful graphics card, a second monitor is the perfect way to exploit the further rendering potential. Two screens enable more successful multitasking and productivity and give you more space to work with. Like nearly every other component, monitors are becoming more of a bargain every day and a decently specced screen shouldn’t run more than £150. If you need a living room set up, most contemporary lcd tv sets can handle PC inputs.
Last but not least, the supreme upgrade of any computer system is the motherboard and the CPU. This is generally the greatest course of action for older hardware that’s definitely starting to show it’s age. Today’s CPUs from AMD and Intel are extremely easy to exchange out and the speed changes are definitely worth it.
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