upgrade slow old tower pc

Nowadays pc market is dominant by mobile devices such as laptop and smartphones. Those old tower pc appears to be slow down. Don't throw them away, these tower pc has plenty of room to upgrade. First of all, let's analyze the bottleneck. In windows Cntr + Alt + Delete will brings up the task manager, where you can see which hardware or service need to upgrade.

If your memory is 100% busy all the time, you need a better memory.

If the disk is 100% busy all the time, your processes have used all the disk read/write bandwidth. Before you get a faster hard disk, try to get rid of the applications that use lots of disk I/O, scan virus, run disk check/fix tool. Sometimes, the memory is the true bottleneck, but your operation system may use hard drive to cache data to save memory. As a result, most of the time is waiting for disk I/O instead of waiting for memory. So use judgement here. Change disk may not help, you may want to add memory instead. However, change disk will help if the software is the problem. After reinstalling operation system, anti-virus, needed softwares via the correct channel, the system start new and clean, the software related bottleneck should be fixed.

If the network is 100% busy, you need a better network card or better internet service. Again, google "network speed", choose a website to have your actual network upload/download speed tested before buying anything.

Well, if the cpu is almost 100% busy, you have to get a solder in order to change the cpu from the mother board, doable but may not worth the hassle, it is outside the scope of this post.

Once we know the bottleneck hardware, we need to buy the replacement. For example, to find the hard disk model number. Simply click on Start and type “msinfo32” in the search bar. Once you've hit Enter, the System Information window will open. Click on Components in order to expand the list, then select Storage, and click on Disks in the expanded Storage menu. You will see your hard drive's specifications, among them the model number.

The next task is to search in amazon, ebay, craglist, newegg, google, etc. to buy the matching hardware.

Once the hardware arrives, you need to shut down the computer, unplug the power, open the case with a screw driver. Take a picture of the wires before you start, so that you can plug them back to the right place once you are done. Find the hardware looks like what you just bought, take a picture, before you loosen the screws, pop out the thing, unplug the cables, so that you know how to put them back once you swap the thing you want to change. The process usually took less than half an hour.

After you plug things back, including the power cord, you press the reset button, then should hear beep when the computer start, and primitive texts showing on the monitor screen. If nothing showing on the monitor screen, check the monitor cables.

If you are replacing hard disk, get your original operating system CD ready. Occasionally, when installing windows 7, we will get blue screen of death "Stop Error c000021a", it can be fixed with the following steps:

• press reset button on the computer
• after restart press and hold F8 key
• In the advanced boot options, select last known good configurations (advanced)
• hit enter

Once windows 7 is installed, we can upgrade to windows 10.