 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Why Upgrade? Tom Coleman |
 |
Owning a computer seems to go through a more or less predictable five or
six-year cycle. It goes like this. First you buy a new computer, typically, for about $2000.
After about two years you will spend about a third of the purchase price, around six or seven hundred
dollars upgrading it. This may take the form of more memory and a larger hard disk. Possibly you might get a
CD Burner or a scanner or a Zip drive. At this time you will usually only buy one or two of these, rarely all
or even most of them. Another eighteen months later you will typically replace the CPU and motherboard and
add some more peripherals and perhaps get a better video or sound card. This second upgrade will cost a bit
more than the first so you spend about half of the original purchase price. Another eighteen months or two
years later you will buy another new computer.
The reason you buy the new computer instead of making another upgrade is that the new computers are so
different that the upgrade path is becoming confusing.
This means that a new computer will last you about five or six years and you will spend best part of the
original purchase price again upgrading over that time.
Think about this. In all probability the computer that you toss out, or pass on down the pecking order,
after five or six years, is more powerful than when it was purchased for $2000, brand new, because you have
made some upgrades. Sometimes the main thing that has changed is your perceptions of what is a good
computer.
Another thing to meditate upon is that they have never built a computer as slow as your keyboard input. So
you may not need a new computer or an upgrade. What you have got may be quite adequate. However some minor
adjustments to your dreams may be in order.
Does It Hurt Today?
Much as you will hate me for it, I will give you a gem of upgrading wisdom. Adopt this as your computing
mantra and never forget it. Regardless of what your kids, the computer salesmen and the hordes of computer
elitists will tell you, believe me, this is the way of true computer happiness.
Another thing to keep in the back of your mind is that all of today's new
computers are hugely overpowered for what most people need to do. Unless you are seriously into game playing
or editing videos or some other specialist activity, virtually anything at all will be good enough.
With the foregoing firmly in the front of your mind, you might want to consider the following when looking to
upgrade.
Enter Style "ATX"
All new computers these days have an ATX motherboard layout. The layout prior to this was the AT. The
difference between these is quite significant. With the AT, the serial and parallel ports and other
peripheral outlets were mounted on the case and attached to pins on the motherboard by a short ribbon cable
or built into cards that fitted into the slots on the motherboard. The ATX layout has these ports built
directly into the motherboard. You will need a new case to accommodate the new location of these ports. All
of the newer CPU sockets are mounted on an ATX motherboard so you cannot do a CPU upgrade without buying a
new case, motherboard and CPU. This will add another $200 minimum to the cost of a CPU upgrade. It could
easily be twice that.
Most of the newer motherboards have sound and video built in to the motherboard. The outlets for these are
built in to the motherboard too, so you need a case that has a place for these to be accessed from the
outside. The circuitry and chip sets associated with these built in features are not bad but they are a long
way from what is available for the users wanting high-end performance. Fortunately it is simple to add a
better video or sound card. The motherboard either auto-detects the add-in card or there is a simple way to
disable the built-in one.
Video Performance
If you are upgrading the video card to get better video performance then use the AGP slot on your
motherboard. If you do not have an AGP slot on the motherboard and video performance is crucial then consider
getting a motherboard with an AGP slot. The AGP slot is faster and more efficient than PCI. If your previous
video card was plugged into an ISA slot and the improvement in video performance does not blow your socks
off, then you did not need the upgrade.
You can get a very good video card for $250. You can get a very acceptable one for $100. Only if you have
very special needs should you spend $300 and never more. Any more than $300 and you are too close to the
leading edge of computing where all the problems are. By the time the general public has completed beta
testing the top end video cards, and they have sorted out all of the bugs in the drivers, the price has
dropped to $300 or less and twelve months later they are down to $100.
Hard Disks
Without going into a convoluted history of hard disks it is difficult to explain the twists and turns that
relationship between motherboards and hard disks have gone through. Instead, a few pointers and traps for
young players might be in order.
The ROM BIOS that runs each time you start your computer has built into it some information about what type
of hard disk it will recognize. Now the bloke who wrote that BIOS had a kind heart. He did his best to make
it as versatile as possible within the limits that compatibility imposed on him. However he was not a Seer
nor a Soothsayer and he could only guess at what the future might hold. Put yourself in his position.
If you had to specify the parameters of the hard disks that your newest BIOS is going to recognize, how big
would you make it? Remember you will be wasting resources if you set aside too much. There are not many 100
GB drives around now but you can't say about next year. So how about we design the BIOS to recognize 200 GB
drives. This should not be a problem for the next couple of years, which is the expected life of the
motherboard model at the retailer. That the buyer might want to upgrade the hard disk in five years when 300
GB drives are considered entry level is just not one of your considerations. Even if you did want to do
something about it, the best you could do would be to write a BIOS upgrade in a few years when you have a
better idea of what the next crop of hard disk drives is going to be like.
And this is where you are today. Many motherboards have limits on the size of hard disk or SIMMs (plug in
memory modules) that they will recognize. Typically you install a new 20 GB drive and your computer sees it
as an 8 GB drive because it does not know about bigger hard disks. Perhaps you install a 256 MB memory module
and it comes up as a 64 MB or, worse still, it confuses the computer and comes up as 16 MB and does not run
properly anyway.
Your only hope is to do a BIOS upgrade. Go to the Web site of either the motherboard maker or the BIOS maker
and see if there is an upgrade available. Frequently there is, and most of them are OK.
Read the Read.Me file and follow the instructions. It is usually pretty straightforward.
A lot of this type of information is available from the documentation that came with the motherboard. If you
do not have the documentation then take a look at the manufacturer's Web site.
Monitors
Another trap for young players is upgrading the monitor. Most of the slightly older computers used 15 inch
monitors. About three years ago they started to bring out 17-inch monitors. Back then a very good 15 in
monitor cost about $600. An entry level 17 in monitor cost about $1000 and all but the high end professional
models were rubbish. The electronics in them you could buy for $300 in a 15 in, maybe less. It took the
market a couple of years to mature. Generally avoid second hand 17 inch monitors more than two years old.
Don't be fooled by this bigger monitor. It is not significantly bigger. Sure it is seductive and BIG. Think
about how often you look at the whole monitor at once. Hardly ever. You look at letters and icons most of the
time. At best you look at something that is less than a quarter of the total screen area, and then not
often.
Try this. Take a two-dollar coin. Place a five-cent coin on top. Alternatively take a one-dollar coin and
place a ten-cent coin on top. Now, at the same screen resolution, if you had an icon on a 15 in monitor the
size of the top coin, it would appear the size of the bottom coin in a 17 in monitor. The question you have
got to ask yourself is "Is the difference worth the extra $200 or so?" And that's comparing new
monitors of the same quality. It is about $600 or $700 dollars if you are just going out to buy a 17 inch
replacement for your otherwise functional 15 inch monitor.
If you want to get a usefully bigger monitor then spend the $2000 and get a 20- or a 21-inch monitor.
Mouse or Mat?
A common upgrade that is made less than a year after purchase, is the mouse. Some mouses (Note that the
plural of a computer mouse is mouses, not mice.) seem to die, get jerky, and bloody-minded sooner than you
expect. Nine times out of ten the problem is not initially in the mouse. It is the mouse mat. These neoprene
off-cuts from old wet suits are really dreadful when it comes to mousing. They pick up the oil off your hand
and transfer it to the ball and rollers of the mouse. Some surfaces are better than others, but by far the
best mousing surface is a cork tile. Plain unvarnished cork. Try it. You will be pleased. Of course it pays
to clean your mouse too. A "metho" soaked cotton bud to clean the gunk off the rollers inside the mouse and a
metho soaked cloth to clean the ball. Takes all of two minutes to do it properly.
Internet Speed
In most cases it is a waste of time upgrading your computer to get a better Internet performance.
The modem is the bottleneck. Most modems are 56K modems complying with the V90 standard. The V90 standard
specifies a data rate of 56Kb (That's kiloBITS. Shift the decimal point one place to the left to get
approximately kiloBYTES). Now! nobody gets 56K. You might get 40 perhaps 44 on a good day but that might not
last and you average 25K or so. The 56K is only the outgoing speed from you to the Internet. The incoming
speed is 33Kb, no more. The serial port that your modem plugs into is rated at 115Kb by the RS232 standard.
It has been that rated speed for the past 20 years so any computer has no difficulty keeping up with the
latest modem. You might strike a slight slowdown if you have an ancient brain-dead video card, or an
incredibly slow hard disk, but that's not likely.
It may be that you would download a file from the Internet that is resource hungry but that is a feature of
the file running on your computer. Nothing to do with the Internet.
If you want faster Internet performance you are looking for ADSL or cable or satellite. There is nothing you
can do to improve the usual phone line, voice line connection. All the slowdown is upstream of your modem and
is out of your control. All of the broadband, faster, Internet services cost lots more and all of them have
their problems. Your only course of action is to make sure your Web browser and e-mail software are properly
set up, and then just sit back and suffer like the rest of us.
Melb PC runs an upgrading and repair course. I teach it so I reckon it is pretty good. Only those who have
difficulty turning a screwdriver will have problems with the course. I suppose you will get more out of the
course if you are familiar with the various components of a computer. The main aim of the course is to
demystify the innards of a computer. Removing the voodoo and improving your attitude is what it is all about.
Sometimes you have to have the courage to face your own preconceptions or your attitude but Melb PC offers
lots of moral support. We are all fellow travellers.
Reprinted from the March 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
