Maintenance

These are my top ten reasons for upgrading a computer; I have broken it down into 2 seperate parts: software and hardware.

Software / Windows OS

1.) Security - When you upgrade programs or Windows, there are significant improvements in the security behind the product. Here are a couple examples:

a.) Norton Internet Security - From NIS 2008 to NIS 2009, the program was written to protect itself from becoming disabled in a more secure way. Malware trying to make the program non-functional is less likely to succeed, allowing the program to stay functional.

b.) Windows XP to Vista - Obviously a major upgrade in terms of security by means of User Account Control. Even if you find it annoying, it is still a great way of protecting yourself. UAC will prompt you before you are able to run a program that is trying to utilize system files. If you are changing the clock settings then great, accept the prompt and move on. If you are browsing the web however, and you get a UAC prompt, it would be best to deny it. FYI- if you are browsing the web and the UAC prompt appears, and you are not trying to change anything on the computer, click "cancel" and get out of that webpage.

2.) Performance - When there are updates to programs, they generally incorporate a lot of bug fixes. Not all bug fixes result in performance gains, but some do. Here are a couple of examples:

a.) Newsbin Pro - This is a program that gets updated frequently. In earlier stages there were issues with the way they handled databases which led to a lot of leaked memory that wasn't recoverable. This caused the program to run slowly. They released an upgrade for the program that fixed this issue.

b.) Windows Vista to Windows 7 - The average boot time is decreased, the average shutdown time is decreased, it takes less time to copy files from HD to HD or HD to USB, programs start faster, and networking performance is gained. All in all, the performance gain from Vista to 7 is quite substantial.

3.) Stability - Once again, it comes down to bug fixes. Programs are going to have bugs, no one can write a perfect program unless it's "Hello World" and I'm sure that has a flaw in it somewhere! So, when developers release a bug fix or upgrades that address several bug fixes, you generally gain an increased amount of stability. People test programs and look for ways to make them crash. When the program crashes they make a note of how it was achieved, then a patch/bug fix/update is released that makes the program more stable. Updating to the latest version of a program is almost always a good idea, from a stability factor alone.

4.) Features - As programs or Windows is updated, new features are rolled out. Some take place behind the scenes, performing tasks that you aren't aware of that make the program more effective and others are objects, such as new buttons that allow you to do different things with the program. The examples here would be countless. Whenever there is a program update with a new version number, you can rest assured that there will be new features included to enhance the experience for you.

Hardware

5.) CPU Upgrade - By upgrading your CPU, your computer will be able to process information faster. This results in programs loading faster, windows starting up and shutting down faster, and general responsiveness increasing.

6.) Memory Upgrade - By upgrading the memory, you have the ability to run memory intensive programs at increased speed. If you want to edit movies or play the newest games, a memory upgrade is a step in the right direction. Getting memory with low timings is going to be the best, but obviously the stick has to work with your motherboard. If programs are starting up sluggish, or the operating system itself is starting slower, a RAM upgrade might be the way to go. However, due to all the complexities of a computer, I would always recommend a diagnostic before a memory upgrade. While memory will boost performance if you have 30 programs loading at startup, if the computer is filled with viruses or the hard drive is highly fragmented, the gain will only be short lived.

7.) Motherboard Upgrade - Upgrading your motherboard can not only improve speed, but also give you features that you may not have already had. One such possibility is moving to a motherboard that supports PCI Express. PCI Express is able to achieve higher performance then a PCI slot, or AGP. Older motherboard styles typically had a few PCI slots for expansion cards, and an AGP slot for a graphics card. The problem with those styles is that they are slow and outdated. It's becoming increasingly more difficult to find AGP graphics cards, and if found, they won't produce the desired effect for playing the newest game or rendering a detailed graphic as opposed to PCI Express. With motherboard upgrades, you can sometimes have the ability to fine tune your hardware speeds, change how the fans are controlled, and increase the types and amount of ports available and many more options.

8.) Hard Drive Upgrade - Hard drive upgrades can be very beneficial to reliability and performance. From a reliability standpoint, adding a second or third hard drive in a RAID array can give you the backup feature you've needed by mirroring the data and storing it on each disk. If one hard drive were to fail, you still have the data saved to the second drive with no data loss. From a performance standpoint, going from and IDE to a SATA interface can increase the speed at which data can be written and read from the drive. Also, going from a 5400 RPM drive to a 7200 or 10,000 RPM can increase how fast data is accessed.

9.) Graphic Card Upgrades - If you are going to be doing any sort of gaming or graphics processing, you will want a graphics card that can handle what you are trying to throw at it. A good GPU that is well cooled will allow you to get high frames per second in games and decrease the amount of time it takes to render graphics, as more processing power is falling on the GPU rather then the CPU.

Personal Reason

10.) I just recently took in a computer for repair. It has been running slowly and coming up with an error message on boot about a missing .DLL file. This is where this blog post stemmed from. The computer in question is roughly 10 years old and is running Windows ME. The problem with this is that new programs don't seem to run on Windows ME anymore. It's incredibly outdated and insecure. There was a freeware anti-virus trying to run and it couldn't, because of the age of the operating system, and then giving a message about the missing .DLL. Now, if all you are doing is checking your email and you have literally all day to do it, then this wouldn't be an issue. Most people now days are more on the go and need things to happen quickly so they can jam everything into their schedule. To summarize the issue with this computer, you can't install programs. Anything newly written will not run effectively or possibly at all, depending upon what it was written in and what system files it requires. The speed of the computer is drastically slow. This is in part to the operating system itself, but a majority of the hardware components are severely outdated. The system itself is not secured by anti-virus software or a firewall making online transactions easily intercepted, and unfortunately, not many anti-virus software companies support such an old system. With this type of computer, I would recommend upgrading to Windows XP Home at the least, and strongly recommend replacement on a security standpoint alone.

Thanks for reading,

Justin Vail
Dog On FIre