In With The New

In With The New

By JAMSHED AVARI

The aged family PC, running on a 1.6 GHz Athlon XP and having been through three motherboard transplants in seven years (though never a reformat!), was finally showing signs of age. Storage was a problem thanks to the lack of SATA ports, the CRT was causing severe eye strain, the DVD writer was jammed, the keyboard was sticky, and it was rusted, shabby and noisy.

Having bought my own laptop, it had long since been abandoned to the parents, whose usage consisted of nothing more than Word and Excel, surfing the Web, sending and reading email, listening to music, and a few dozen rounds of Solitaire every day. But they did get more adventurous over time, downloading little games and utilities, editing photos and music, streaming Internet radio and watching videos. They started spending more time online, discovered Skype and YouTube, and generally started feeling like there was more potential to be tapped.

 We’d stuck with Windows XP and Office 2000, having no concrete reason to upgrade, but always being tempted to. As much as that machine had frustrated me even when it was brand new in 2003, the parents continued to be satisfied till just a few months ago. The tipping point was caused by two unlikely events. First, we decided no matter what, a new monitor was needed. And second, my father was gifted a new iPod on his birthday.

Having experienced the joys of big, wide monitors, I was determined that the parents would not be stuck with a poky little 15- or 17-incher, especially since prices have crashed so much. Except that in my enthusiasm, I forgot that the onboard graphics wouldn’t be able to handle a decent resolution. We came home one day with a brilliant 22-inch high-def LCD (plus a nice keyboard and mouse set), only to discover that the damned onboard S3 graphics just wouldn’t go above a certain point. We’d reached the limit of our PC’s capabilities, and it seemed pointless to scrounge for an AGP card to upgrade it.

The iPod required the latest version of iTunes, which for assorted reasons just didn’t want to work. The shiny new toy lay in its box for nearly two months while it was decided a full revamp was needed.

We then spent some time considering a new nettop. This seemed like a good bet for the parents. The tiny sizeand low power consumption were plus points. But it would undoubtedly need to last another decade or so, and what if the parents someday want to push its limits and hit a wall again? Plus, we thought we only needed a few upgrades which would work out cheaper, and a friend had offered me a secondhand Core 2 Duo and G31 motherboard in good condition. In hindsight, we probably should have dumped every last bit of the old PC and just started from scratch.

The initial decision was to just pop in the new CPU, motherboard, and the matching RAM and heatsink that we bought. But since storage was short and stuff needed to be backed up, a new hard drive was in order too. The old power supply wouldn’t work with the new motherboard, and since a new PSU was needed and the old cabinet was so rusty, we bought one of those too. Oh and Windows 7 just came out, so why not enjoy the HD monitor’s potential! Eventually what we had was a whole new PC’s worth of components… and a folder of bills that added up to roughly the same as a little nettop would have cost!

So now the new PC is up and running. I estimate it’s about 20 times faster, though I also suspect a simple reformat of the old one would have been good enough that the parents wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. But they do love Windows 7’s swooshy graphics, and dad’s thrilled with his iPod, ripping CDs and syncing a little more music onto it each night.

And the old Athlon XP? It’s still perfectly functional, reconnected to its blurry CRT and sticky keyboard. As soon as all the old data is copied off it, I’ll spend a Sunday reformatting it just to see what it can still do! And if we can’t find any good purpose to put it to, we’ll donate it to a school or charity. While it’s great to have a fast new family computer, I’ll always wonder how much longer the old one could have been made to last.