Old computer upgrades

[ecweave]

A friend gave me his old computer today and I am bored so since i have more computers than i know what to do with I've decided to test out the knowledge Ive gained from reading the boards here and see what kinda of improvements i can make to his PC and if it shows enough improvement. Ill give it back to him for his kids to use or something. Anyways I hope this is the right area to post this if not let me know. I am going to be making tweaks to a lot of stuff and was wondering what is a good overall benchmark application that i can get to see if the overall performance of the PC has gotten better....or one that would point out many different areas such as hard drive search speed, CPU, ram, maybe even bandwidth...If there is such a one. I will start with this and then probably stop in and ask more questions assuming I don't kill the computer first ...He has a lot of stuff on here and i am not even sure he has ever defragmented the hard drive....so I got a lot of fun work ahead. I will enter all the data in a chart because i am nerd and want to see what difference a lot of the tricks actually make in overall performance. Thanks for any help.

 

[Rogue77777]

It would be nice to know the specs and how old the computer is. Also, if you spend more then 50% of what the computer is worth, then you're better off just buying or putting together a new one. And it's not really worth putting one together if you're just using it for email, photo's, web sufing, work, etc.
If you want a cheap quick upgrade, see how much ram is on the machine and upgrade it to 2 or 4 gigs if it has less then 2 gigs already installed. You can also check the size of the hard drive and add a storage drive, moving your photos and docs to it to free up space on the main drive.
But like I said, depending on how old it is, it may or may not be worth the time & money to invest in it when the technology is much better now.

 

[ecweave]

Yea Ive been fooling around with it and been thing the same thing thanks for the response though think ill just scrap it for parts

 

[Rogue77777]

Make sure you either save their photos & docs to another source.