Digital Home Thoughts: Keeping Old Faithful Fast

"My Dell came with AMD HD 4200 integrated graphics — and an open PCI Express (PCIe) slot for a future upgrade to a discrete graphics card. Lately I’ve noticed that the computer seemed a bit sluggish when displaying high-definition video, and I wondered if adding a graphics card would improve its performance. I’m not a gamer, so I wasn’t looking for hot-shot gaming capabilities."

Computers are incredibly cheap, at least compared to what they used to cost over a decade ago, but that does not mean that people can afford to upgrade every year, or even every few years. I have computers that are well over 5 years old that are still in use, and I am willing to bet that a great deal of people out there are using computers even older. Old computers are trusty, longtime friends, but do not always perform great with what we demand of them today. Upgrades are a cheap way to keeping them perky, and adding a video card is one of the best investments you can make, especially now that hardware acceleration is becoming more commonplace. The only other major upgrade I could recommend is RAM. Computers sold four to five years ago tended to be anemic on RAM, often having 1GB or less. This was one of the reasons why Microsoft Vista performed like a dog. I have noticed that a lot of computers today are selling with 3-4GB of RAM, which probably helps considerably with performance. Even old Windows XP needs almost 1GB of RAM to be happy when a few programs are running. Without that space, your computer will spend more time swapping memory than actually doing something productive. Has anyone else found cheap, effective upgrades for their old bessie?