appliancerepairfirst

Computers are indispensable for much of the work and play people do. After years of stagnation during which people focused on of?ce automation and business applications and asked where the value was in the ever faster parade of new systems, PCs have crossed a price and performance threshold. Systems you can buy today for hundreds of dollars, not thousands, have the power to make home movies, store and play your music, serve as your home darkroom, and enhance a home theater.

They still do of?ce automation, too.
As recently as when we wrote the third edition of this book, a computer with that kind of power cost thousands of dollars, and most people used a single PC. Four years later, a PC costing less than $500 can handle almost everything you might do, and a surprisingly large number of homes have three or more computers on a local area network. Peoples priorities have shifted to put stability and capability on par with minimum cost and maximum value.

You Can Do What You Can
Imagine
Everyone does something different with their computer, or does similar things in different ways. These differences lead to different answers to the question of whats the best computer for you. You can start the analysis to answer that question by thinking about these issues:

- What do you use the computer for? What programs do you use, and how?

- What are the bene?ts you expect from your computer? Will achieving those bene?ts alter
the ways you use the computer?

If you upgrade, what will limit the performance of your computer?

- If you buy new equipment, how much and what kind of equipment do you need? What are the options in choosing that equipment? How are you likely to want to upgrade that equipment in the future, and what should you do now to make that easier?

- For both upgrades and new purchases, what are the support and maintenance requirements, and how can your decisions make getting support easier when something goes wrong?

- After you select a hardware con?guration, what are the growth options during the life of the equipment, and what are the bene?ts those options can provide? What choices can you make early on to reduce the cost of future growth?

The following pages expand on each of these questions to explain why theyre important and how your answers affect your choices.

Top

By : E-book pc upgrade and repair

Different things you do create different amounts of work for your computer. The typist using an ancient DOS version of WordPerfect places relatively small demands on a computer. The host for a network game tournament needs some memory, a decent processor (also called a central processing unit, or CPU), and high-speed communications. The game player needs screamingly fast CPU and video. The publisher assembling books from text, photographs, and graphics needs it all lots of memory, a fast CPU, high-resolution video, voluminous storage, and good communications capabilities if ?les are transmitted electronically.

How you use your computer determines how great a workload you impose on it, so well discuss not only what you use the machine for, but also what programs you use and in what combinations you use them. These factors affect how powerful a machine you need. For example, suppose youre still running the computer you bought in 1998. You might have an old version of Microsoft Word on a machine with a Pentium II processor clocked at 266 MHz, 16 megabytes (MB) of memory, and a 4 gigabyte (GB) disk. Youre still runnin Windows 95 on the machine, but your partner says that youll be fantastically
better off with Windows XP and the improved reliability of the more recent versions of Windows. She convinces you to upgrade your software, but now you ask Will I have to upgrade my computer to run that new software? With a computer like that, the answer is Yes. Youll need more memory, more disk space, and a faster processor. Well look at how you can upgrade your machine, and examine the possibility of replacing the main processor board the motherboard as an alternative to piecemeal upgrades. Well also talk about whether or not upgrading this machine makes sense compared to purchasing a new computer sometimes its far less expensive to get the same capabilities with a new machine than by upgrading one you have.

We want to caution you to be hardnosed about upgrades because much of the hype and noise you hear that computers are obsolete six months after you buy them is driven by the notion that people always need the fastest, latest hard- ware. Thats absurd. If your computer does what you want the way you want, nothing forces you to upgrade your hardware or software. You may need.

Less Than the Sum of the Parts
We recently decided to upgrade our daughters old computer because the old 600 MHz Pentium III in it was too slow to support the programming and other schoolwork she was doing. We targeted a Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz or faster, 512MB or memory or more, and at least 40GB of disk, and we planned to install the upgrades in her existing case.

Much to our surprise, thats not how it played out. We check the Dell site now and then to keep track of whats new and where current prices are, and stumbled across a con?guration that was both signi?cantly faster than what wed planned and including shipping was about a hundred dollars less than we would have paid for upgrades. That deal went away in a matter of days, but not before we snapped one up. We couldnt buy the upgrade parts for the same price at which Dell could sell and ship the complete machine. It doesnt happen often, but its worth remembering.

upgrades to do new things, or to do the same things with new software, but thats an explicit choice you get to make. Which operating system do you want, and why? Upgrades that let you do more with your computer always seem better than ones required just to run new versions of the same programs the same way as before. Upgrades that increase capabilities and productivity create addedvalue; ones that just maintain existing functionality are little more than a surcharge on the cost of the software upgrade.

The hardware upgrades you need also re?ect the operating system you decide to run. For example, Windows 2000 and Windows XP are free from the resource restrictions that plagued Windows 95 through Windows Me. Windows 2000 and Windows XP can run more programs at the same time than their predecessors. If you take advantage of this say by keeping your e-mail, word processing, and fax software open while you run a corporate order-entry application you will use more memory than before. You may also ?nd that you need higher resolution on your display to keep all those windows visible at once. Greater display resolution may in turn make you want to replace a 14- or 17-inch
monitor with a 19-inch one to keep the text legible.

If your computer is on a home or of?ce network, you may ?nd Windows improved capabilities invaluable when handling multiple forms of network communication. You can work with ?le servers, printers, cameras, and other devices at the same time that you search the Internet for the latest news. You can let your coworkers pull ?les off your disks to combine with their own work. As easy as this can now be, though, it means your computer is doing more work. That means memory and processor resources
are being used to service the networking load. If you dont have enough of those resources, youll need to upgrade to keep working at full speed while these features run behind the scenes.

If youre deploying an Internet server, youll want to choose between Unix and Windows NT. Both can host a full suite of services, but youll have to choose among a wide range of choices that affect the hardware you need, the available support, and the cost of software. Gaining an understanding of your hardware requirements begins by estimating the basic hardware you need to maintain your current capability. This book shows you how to make those estimates and how to achieve a complete understanding of your growth options.

Top

By : E-book pc upgrade and repair

The starting point for upgrades is always the existing computer. Well discuss how to characterize the performance you can expect from that machine and how to identify the components that limit the performance of your applications. Knowing that will let you predict if the machines performance needs to be improved. Youll see how to identify the choke points that limit performance, how to eliminate them, and how to decide which upgrade options make sense. Youll learn how to identify when its better to replace the entire computer than to make incremental upgrades.

For example, suppose your companys standard user workstation is a Pentium III processor running at 933 MHz, hosting Windows 2000 in 256MB of memory. Youve been using desktop videoconferencing to talk to your children at college, but the video quality isnt very good. Can you afford to ?x this? Perhaps. You might need faster communications, might need more memory, or might simply need to
drop in a faster video card.

Or, suppose you have a Celeron 1 GHz processor with 128MB of memory, and you want to know if you can use it to process photos from your new digital camera. The analyses youll do with this book will show you that you can, but youll want to upgrade memory to 256MB or 512MB, and may need to add disk space too.

The process of analyzing upgrade options is very much like that of selecting options to include in a new machine. Well look at a wide range of computer components from the point of view of what each can do for you, examining the characteristics of each and looking at how those characteristics affect the performance you can expect. Well look at relative advertised prices to show the relative cost of features and performance. The prices youll pay for equipment changes as technology evolves, so well use the comparisons to illustrate the analysis rather than as the rigid basis for choice.

What new computer should you buy?
Buying a new computer is very much like a 100 percent upgrade of an old com- puter; in fact, new computers are often bought as replacements for older ones. Upgrading a machine constrains the choice of components in order to remain compatible with surviving components, while con?guring a new computer opens up all the technology options. The decision of what to buy is therefore more complex for new computers, requiring you to weed through more choices.

For example, suppose youve narrowed your selection to two models, one of which uses what the vendor calls a 533 MHz front side bus and the other of which offers an 800 MHz front side bus. The 800 MHz bus machine is more expensive, so you want to know if the extra money is worth it. Well give you the tools to decide by showing you what a front side bus is, why its speed is important for some processors but not for others, and how to decide which choice is your best option.

Top

By : E-book pc upgrade and repair