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Ken Fermoyle: Upgrading?


Ken's Korner Column - Sept. 1998

Upgrade or Buy New?
Tough decision, but adding big hard drive makes sense

by Ken Fermoyle, TUG-NET

With new computer prices at record low levels, does it make sense to upgrade your current computer or should you just take the plunge and buy a new one? Unfortunately, there are few easy answers, and those few apply mainly to very old (386 and 486 models) and rather new ones.

Upgrading 386/486 and even some early Pentiums generally is not wise economically. Their motherboards don't support newer CPUs that bring big boosts in performance. If you buy a new montherboard, it must be an AT type to fit in your old case, and many new boards are ATX types.

How about overdrive processors? Forget them, is my advice, unless you can get one for little or nothing from a friend or at a swap meet. According to recent catalogs, a new Intel OverDrive that jumps a 486DX/33 to an 84MHz Pentium costs close to $200; same for upgrading a Pentium 100 to a Pentium 166 with MMX. Evergreen overdrives bump a 486 up to 133MHz for about $100, early Pentiums to 200MHz with MMX for $160. You can buy a Socket 7 motherboard and 225MHz WinChip for about $150 to $200, which may be a better choice. (More coming on WinChips in a future column.)

Upgrading a Pentium 75 to 150 to MMX 180MHz Pentium (about $240) or Pentium 100/133/166 to 200MHz Pentium with MMX (about $280) are possible options. Notethat those prices represent 25 to 40% or more of the cost of a new Pentium MMX, AMD K6, or Cyrix machine with more advanced components than those in your old computer.

For later models Pentium MMX computers, two enhancements that make sense are adding memory and a second, large-capacity hard drive. If you run Windows 95 and go from 16 to 32 megs of RAM (Random Access Memory), you should get a noticeable increase in performance. Going from 32 to 64 megs brings performance rewards, too, and costs very little these days.

Adding a large-capacity hard drive is, in fact, a sound upgrade for just about any Pentium-class machine. An Ultra DMA drive is backward compatible with IDE technology. It just won't deliver the same level of performance in an older computer as it will in a newer one that supports such drives.

Your investment in the drive will not be lost if you later buy a new computer. The Ultra DMA drive can be swapped into your new machine with no difficulty.

More good news: installing the big new drives is not the hassle that hard drive installation was not too many years ago. I added a 6.4-gig Seagate Medalist to one of our machines some months back. I set aside an entire afternoon and psyched myself up for the project. To my surprise, it took less than two hours, with most of that spent in shoehorning the drive into the box, which is pretty loaded.

Seagate's DiscWizard software formatted and partitioned the new drive automatically. The process is a no-brainer, if you follow the instructions, especially the one about installing and running DiscWizard before you install and configure the hard drive.

I was so pleased with the drive I bought a second one for another of our office computers. The machine was an older one I goofed somehow. I got help from the most competent, nicest tech support support person it has been my good fortune to encounter in the 15 years since I bought my first computer. He took me carefully through the process, explaining where I had gone wrong and what I needed to do to correct the problem.

We swapped some of the components, including the Seagate drive, out of this old system into a brand-new computer recently. (The new mid-tower box contains a 225MHz WinChip CPU and Tyan Socket 7 motherboard, an excellent, budget-priced combination we will look at in more detail next month.) It performs beautifully in the new environment, and neither of the Medalist 6.4-gig drives have given us even a hint of trouble.

Adding memory, as mentioned above, is an excellent way to enhance the performance of almost any Windows computer that is running Win3.X or Win95/98. Most experts regard 32 megs of RAM as the practical minimum for Win9X (64 megs for NT). Anyone using just 16 megs is not getting optimum performance from his or her system.

With memory prices so low today, upgrading RAM is well worth the small cost involved. As part of my upgrading program, all of the computers in our office will soon have at least 64 megabytes of RAM, and I'm planning to have 128 installed in our new server.

One cautionary note here: the variety of RAM chips available is very confusing. We have older machines with standard RAM, many with EDO (Extended Data Output) RAM and newer machines with SD-RAM (Synchronous Dynamic RAM. We had RAM chips, the SIMMs (Single Inline Memory Modules) and new DIMMs (Double Inline Memory modules.

And there are more new types coming, folks.

So be very careful when buying RAM; be sure what you get will work in your system. Consult your manuals and documents, and deal with someone knowledgeable about the subject. That may NOT include the hardto-find "sales associates" at the big computer chain stores!

You might be better dealing with someone who specializes in memory chips, at a computer show or swap meet, or on the Internet. If you're fortunate enough to have a reliable local computer shop with a competent staff, as I have (ASC Computers in Woodland Hills, CA, 818/876-9187. www.ascci.com), take your computer there. Technicians can check your system, tell you what RAM will work in it, and then install if for you.

Ken

* Watch for Upgrades, Part 2 in the next Ken's Korner column.

Copyright 1998 by Ken Fermoyle, Fermoyle Publications.

Ken Fermoyle has written some 2,500 articles for publications ranging from Playboy, PC World and Popular Science to MacWeek & Microtimes. He was cohost/producer of a radio show on computers and a partner in a DTP service bureau during the '80s. Ken's Korner articles are available free to User Group newsletters and Websites. For permission to reprint this article, contact kfermoyle@earthlink.net.


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