Maverick Ramblings

We just answered an email from a client asking for advice about storing data, and we thought it might be of interest to other digital packrats out there… If money was no object, we’d all have multi-terabyte drives in our PCs and keep every file we ever created at our fingertips.  Instead, we prioritize, just [...]

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Now that you’ve identified what parts of your PC need to be upgraded, you need to decide how to deal with it. Some issues can be overcome by minor upgrades, but others aren’t worth the cost or trouble, and are an ideal opportunity to replace the PC.

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Maybe now it’s finally time to upgrade your PC, but what should you upgrade? The whole system? Just some components? When faced with limited resources, we have to make decisions about the best ways to employ them. How can you tell what to do?

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Besides hard drive data storage, there is another area in which computer performance may become degraded, appearing to be due to age: increasing demands on the processor and memory. This may be resolvable without upgrading your computer.

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In the previous section, we discussed the concepts behind computer optimization and hard drive fragmentation. After fragmentation, the next issue to discuss about how hard drives slow down our computers is the increasing volume of data being stored on them.

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Many people are under the impression that a computer’s performance deteriorates with age. I’d like to disspell that myth: computers are mostly solid-state technology that is largely unaffected by age. I’m not saying that older computers don’t run more slowly, but once we correct the notion that the slow-down is caused by its unalterable age, the problem becomes one that can usually be remedied without buying a newer computer.

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