Upgrade PC Hardware

Before we talk about how to upgrade a PC, we have to address whether or not it's cost effective to do so. I measure cost effectiveness two ways. One, can you simply buy a new or better used PC for the amount of money it will cost you to upgrade your current box. Two, will the upgrade really have a significant impact on the user experience (ie, will you be happy that you spent the money. I've written about this in more detail on my other site, but I'm going to sum up here in a quick table. The obvious one I don't talk about is power supply, because that's not really an upgrade item, it's a repair item, since nobody upgrades their power supply unless they need to:-)

I've done upgrades on all of the major PC brands and models over the years. The main problem you'll encounter in cheaper models of brand name computers is planned obsolescence, no room at all for upgrade components. I've opened up cases that simply wouldn't accept a second hard drive, and cases with no room for a second CD or DVD are very common. If the front of your old Compaq doesn't have a rectangular cut-out below the existing CD or DVD drive, there's just no room to add one. The solution to upgrading computer parts when there's no room in the case is to replace the existing part with an improved version. That works fine for a CD drive, but for a hard drive, it means transferring all of your programs and data to the new drive, which is a fairly complicated task for a beginner. If you're going to replace your hard drive, the best bet is to simply use the restore CDs that came with your Sony or Emachines to initialize the new hard drive. If your system shipped without restore CDs, you probably don't want to try this upgrade. All of the brand name manufacturers have experimented with proprietary designs over the years, including special power supply connectors, odd sized motherboards, and unique motherboard I/O cores that will only work in a particular case. You can always hack your case up and make it work by changing enough parts, but there's little point when new cases are so cheap and used PCs are a dime a dozen. If your Dell or HP uses a proprietary power supply connector for the motherboard, that's a reason not to upgrade the motherboard. Compaq use to be the worst offender when it came to proprietary design, which probably means they had the best engineers:-) The early Emachines I worked on were also pretty inflexible, but I recently worked on Emachines that had been upgraded with a DVD recorder and a second hard drives. The reason I was called in was the power supply had died, but it took a standard ATX replacement. I also worked on a brand-new high end Dell just a couple weeks ago that had no IDE connector to accepts the hard drive from the computer it was replacing as a second drive. The new Dell was strictly SATA, it didn't have any free IDE capacity.

Component Cost Range Time Outcome
Motherboard $50 - $250 1 hour to 3 hours (depends on Windows) If you're talking about a PC that's several years old, upgrading the motherboard with a new motherboard, an inexpensive new CPU in an advanced technology family, and some DDR-2 or DDR memory, is equivalent to building a new PC with a slowish video card and drives. You'll really see the difference, you'll be in a great position to upgrade the rest, but why not just build a new one from scratch? In any case, the bug in the soup is getting Windows happy with a new motherboard underneath - goes pretty smoothly sometimes if it similar technology or the same manufacturer, but usually it's a pain in the behind for a newbie.
CPU $30 - $300 5 minutes to 1/2 hour (depends on heatsink) The only time it makes sense to upgrade a CPU is if you have a low speed CPU in the family. If you replace a 1.4 GHz CPU with a 1.6 GHz CPU, you'll need benchmarking software to see the difference. On the other hand, if you replace a 700 MHz CPU with a 1.4 GHz CPU, it will scream. That's cheap, the expensive proposition is replacing a 2.4 GHz CPU with a 3.2 GHz CPU. I'd only consider it if you're a gamer or a serious data cruncher. The CPU has to be a physical match for the socket (which changes every couple years) and explicitly supported by the motherboard, so don't try it without motherboard documentation, unless it's in the cheap end of the range.
RAM $20 - $100 5 minutes to 15 minutes If your system supports more RAM and you can figure out what kind it is, go ahead and buy all you can stuff in there, at least up to 1 GB for WIndows XP. The performance gain will really depend on what software you are running, but it's cheap, it's easy, and it does make a difference.
Hard Drive $50 - $ 200 15 minutes to add as second drive, several hours to move operating system and all data and make primary drive Your PC was probably built with a hard drive that could take advantage of the interface speed, so it's unlikely you can jam a new hard drive with a faster interface into your PC, your motherboard won't be up to it. You can buy a hard drive with a bigger cache or a faster spindle speed, but you won't notice the difference most the time. You can buy a second identical drive and do RAID 0, which will speed up reads appreciable. However, the only reason I'd upgrade a hard drive is if I needed more space, and I'd probably add it as a second drive. Otherwise, you need to Ghost the original boot drive over, or reinstall everything from scratch.
CDR or DVDR $30 - $100 15 minutes to 1 hour (depends on case geometry, software installation and update) If you don't have a recorder, it's well worth it, but make sure you don't buy a "bare" drive, which means no software. Hint: They don't record without recording software. I would never upgrade to get a higher speed drive, it just doesn't make a difference. Nobody runs software off discs, you install it to the hard drive. Unless you're in the production business, record speed is irrelevant.
Video Card $50 - $500 15 minutes to 30 minutes (depends on software install) Only if you're an artist or a gamer. Otherwise, a video card is a video card is a video card. If you're a gamer, you may even buy two high end PCI express cards to run in tandem, though that will cost you closer to a grand. With video cards for gaming, you pretty much get what you pay for, but make sure your power supply can handle the extra load because these things eat major wattage.
Modem $10 - $100 15 minutes to 1 hour (DSL and cable modem can take a while to configure) A 56 Kb/s modem is a 56 Kb/s modem, but sometimes they fail slowly with age, so a new one might buy you a slightly faster connection rate due to a lower error rate. If your ISP makes a change and your dial-up goes to pot, try a new one, they're cheap. Changing to broadband (DSL or cable) is the difference between night and day. However, the DSL or cable modem may be free, it's the $20 to $30 EVERY MONTH that gets expensive (I'm allowing $15 allowance for canceling your dial-up).
Sound Card $10 - $50 15 minutes to 30 minutes (disabling motherboard integrated sound and installing software can take time) Unless you're a musician or an avid gamer, there's very little to be gained from from upgrading your sound card, sound quality is really a function of the amplified speakers. If you're a gamer, graduating to 5.1, 6.1 or even 7.1 means more surround sound and low end, which can have a big impact on games (or watching DVDs).

I've been putting together an illustrated guide for all the basic upgrades you can do to a desktop computer. The first one I did was probably the most common (and the poorest photography since I was just starting the work), and illustrates how to replace a hard drive. This is one of those jobs where the physical installation is pretty easy if you can handle a screwdriver, but if you aren't just adding a second drive for more capacity, the software setup takes forever. Transferring your operating system from and old boot drive to a new boot drive really requires a third party software solution like Ghost, though many retail hard drives come with a utility to do this for you as a one time bonus. It doesn't always work.

While it's generally only done as a repair as opposed to an upgrade, I did a page on how to upgrade a power supply. If you've upgraded your video card to one with it's own cooling system, there's a good chance you're going to need a new power supply to handle it. Keep in mind that the cheaper brand name PCs are built with the smallest power supply they can get away with for the configuration they are shipping. They aren't worried about your future expansion path.

Next I did a generic guide on how to replace a CPU using a Socket A Athlon as the example system. The point of this example is just to show you the steps involved, to make sure you understand the importance of the active heatsink and that it complicates the job beyond just dropping a CPU in a socket. You can only upgrade your CPU with a model in the same family that is explicitly supported by the motherboard. Just because it physically fits the socket doesn't mean the motherboard chipset can support it, you'll have to search the web or the documentation before hand to find out exactly how much more CPU your motherboard can handle.

A lot of people replace their sound card when it's not broken. It could be that the speaker amplifier has failed (or is unplugged), that the audio cable has been pinched and broken inside the insullation, or the volume is turned down. The volume being turned down or muted in some hidden mixer panel is probably the most common reason people replace their sound card unnecessarily. It's an easy job, as far as adapter replacement goes, though everybody forgets to hook up the CD audio lead. Also, if the original sound is integrated on the motherboard, you may run into conflicts if disabling sound in CMOS Setup doesn't completely hide it from Windows.

Even now that half of America is using broadband, the half that can't afford it or don't have it available may need to know how to replace a modem. Modems are always failing due to lighting strikes, a common symptom is that all of the phones in the house will stay dead until you unplug the modem because it's failed as a short circuit. This is real common in Florida and other areas with frequent thunderstorms or at high elevations. It's a very easy replacement, but a modem can give your hand a nasty shock even with the computer unplugged because there's a capacitor that holds a reasonably high voltage (phones run on something like 55V if I recall.

I don't know if anybody remembers the cute commercial where a kid sees an adult putting a tape in a VCR and asks the parent what he's doing. Daddy says, "I'm feeding the VCR" and the next scene is the kid spooning porridge in opening. CD and DVD drive are subject to all of the usual failures of electro-mechanical optical devices, with motors and lenses that get dirty, plus sometimes somebody just sticks the wrong thing in the tray and forces it shut. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to replace your CD burner or DVD Drive and they're also cheap. CD and DVD drives are outwardly identical, so the replacement procedure is exactly the same. The main issue you'll run into is old recorder software not supporting the new drive or being upgradeable, so you should buy a drive with possible whenever possible.

Gamers frequently replace the video card when they get sick of the 3D motion sticking and jumping. Video processing is the main bottleneck in computer gaming, and at the highest end, people spend $1000 for two compatible video cards that can share their processing power to drive a single monitor. It's a simple replacement as long as you buy the right card for your motherboard architecture and you have enough power available for the video processor and video RAM. I wouldn't spend too much a new adpater for an old PC before studying up, because the CPU still carries some of the load.

There's no point in replacing the RAM on the motherboard unless it's failed, you aren't going to get more performance than what it shipped with. However, if you want to increase the total capacity of RAM installed, it's easiest to remove what you have buy the full amount of memory you need to reduce the number of modules and possible compatibility problems.

Finally, we get to how to replace a motherboard, which I present as two different jobs. First we deal with removing the existing motherboard and all the connections you'll have to undo to make that possible. Next we install the new motherboard in the case, which involves both physical installation (standoffs and screws) and reconnecting all the data and power cables. I don't go over installing the RAM or CPU on the new motherboard since that's already covered in the guides listed above.