Revive That Old PC
The average life of a PC has often been touted at 3 to 5 years. This doesn’t mean you can’t get many more useful years out of one. As your operating system has grown, through all of those updates for security and other improvements, it has developed a voracious appetite for memory. New software is developed with the newer CPU’s and Memory in mind. It only stands to reason, if you have all of this updated software, the hardware needs to keep up. The simplest way to buy extra life for your PC is to increase the amount of memory installed on the motherboard. If your motherboard provides “shared” memory for the graphics requirements of your PC, installing a separate graphics card and turning off the share on the motherboard (a BIOS adjustment) can provide the extra performance to make your old PC feel like a new one. Couple that with the cleanup and defrag options in the previous article, and you may even get a few years out of an older “no longer supported” operating system.