Time for a new PC?

jerry12953

jerry12953

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Jeremy Moore
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My current PC is 5+ years old. It's a Dell and has performed faultlessly for most of its lifetime.

However, the hard disc is now almost full and I am having increasing problems opening it up either from "sleep" or "off". It almost always crashes on start-up, especially if IE is involved.

If I were replacing it I'd probably go Dell again as this has been so reliable.

any thoughts?
 
Hi

What spec is the current PC and what is your budget?

The above may help with suggestions, or just upgrading your PC with a ssd/ram etc.
 
www.pcspecialist.co.uk are pretty good and have many tailoring options unlike Dell seem to now.

That said, I've done well with Dell over the years too.

For my office PC - I have had two from pcspecialist and my last two laptops have been from Dell.
 
I honestly can't remember the spec; it wasn't quite top of the range when I bought it so I'm sure an update would be of benefit speed-wise. IIRC, a mate added some RAM for me ( now 8gb?) and put in a larger HD (1TB) but that is now almost full. I'd be thinking about £500 for an upgrade.

I wondered if the opening problems could have been related to the nearly full HD (or is it just IE?????)

What is the benefit of a SSD? At least I've heard of them....;)

I'm not really IT literate so too much jargon will go over my head!
 
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What is the model number?

I have an old core 2 duo dell vostro 200 with a ssd and 8gb of ram and it does all I want from it.

Having a ssd with the os and apps speeds up the boot time of the PC. If your 1tb is full have you backed up the data? If not it is something you need to look at.
 
I tend to agree with Ianp5a but first I'd go for a good clean up.

If you haven't got it, download CCleaner and let it clear out all the temporary rubbish the PC has accumulated over the years.
Check what is being loaded at Startup. Programs you install will sometimes configure themselves to be loaded at Startup even if they are something that you may use only rarely. If you don't know how to find out what is being loaded at Startup, Goggle for "How to run msconfig in Windows xx" Alternatively if you use CCleaner you can see what is enabled at Startup from the CCleaner 'Tools' link.

Yes, having a very full hard disk will slow things. Have a look to see if there is anything that you could get rid of.

The cheapest option could be installing a new hard disc (or SSD - the main advantage is fast loading speed, I'm told), doing a fresh installation of your OS on the new drive and using this one to boot from. You could then delete all of the OS from the current drive to free up more space. Better still, if you have the discs or installation licences of downloaded programs and have backed up important docs, photos, etc from the current full drive, you could reformat it and have a clean drive on which to put back all the things you really need.

Often cleaning up a PC and especially a new installation of the OS can speed up a machine.

SSDs have come down in price and hard drives are cheap as chips - about £40ish for a 1Tb drive.

Dave
 
sep9001 said:
What is the model number?

I have an old core 2 duo dell vostro 200 with a ssd and 8gb of ram and it does all I want from it.

Having a ssd with the os and apps speeds up the boot time of the PC. If your 1tb is full have you backed up the data? If not it is something you need to look at.
Click to expand...

It's an OptiPlex 960 so pretty much top of the range at the time although it didn't have the fastest processor in it. Big bonus for me was the SFF case (tiny!) As said upgraded RAM to 8gb and fitted larger HD = 1TB I think.

If I could stop it crashing that would help. I think it's something to do with IE. I also have Chrome installed but have yet o get on with it.

But I still have the almost full hard disc to think about. Its full of RAW files! Backed up, I might add.
 
jerry12953 said:
Its full of RAW files! Backed up, I might add.
Click to expand...

How about buy another external HDD, (two backups are always better than one), make sure all your RAW files are backed up to both ext.HDD's, then delete all the RAW files on the PC. After that, use CCleaner and Defraggler and any other suggestions that you've receive along the way to tidy up the PC's HD, and see how it performs?

In a worst case you'll have two backups of your precious RAW files and a PC that would still need upgrading.
 
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JohnX said:
How about buy another external HDD, (two backups are always better than one), make sure all your RAW files are backed up to both ext.HDD's, then delete all the RAW files on the PC. After that, use CCleaner and Defraggler and any other suggestions that you've receive along the way to tidy up the PC's HD, and see how it performs?

In a worst case you'll have two backups of your precious RAW files and a PC that would still need upgrading.
Click to expand...


That sounds like a plan! It's not something I would approach without trepidation, though......
 
Looking online you pc is either a Core @ Duo with either E8400, E8500 or E8600 CPU if it was a base model, or it could be a Core 2 Quad. Both are good CPU, therefore as suggested in the above posts. I would back up the 1tb drive and delete the files, once done it may be worth re installing the OS and see how you get on.

Due to the PC being a SFF I do not think you will benefit from an SSD as you will have to store all your Pics and Data on a USB drive and that would be a USB2 which may not help.
 
sep9001 said:
Looking online you pc is either a Core @ Duo with either E8400, E8500 or E8600 CPU if it was a base model, or it could be a Core 2 Quad. Both are good CPU, therefore as suggested in the above posts. I would back up the 1tb drive and delete the files, once done it may be worth re installing the OS and see how you get on.

Due to the PC being a SFF I do not think you will benefit from an SSD as you will have to store all your Pics and Data on a USB drive and that would be a USB2 which may not help.
Click to expand...

There maybe space for 2nd hard drive inside the PC.

Buy a 240GB SSD and install the OS on this.
Move the existing 1TB drive onto another SATA port and make it "Drive 2".

Although, you will not get the full 100% out of the SSD due to the port, but it will be a lot quicker than what you have at the moment.
 
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Many thanks for the suggestions, folks.

I have taken the plunge and begun moving some of my RAW files on to an external HD, which has free'd up a bit of space on the PC. I also deleted some software although I don't know what some of it is. Done a clean-up of the HD as well.

Also deleted some old Lightroom back-ups which take up a huge amount of space. Each one is getting on for 1 Gb.

I will certainly look into the possibility of a SSD. I see that hybrid HD's are now available. Does anyone have any experience with these? Presumably they have a normal HD for storage and a SSD for installing the OS, programs, etc?

Have also started using Chrome instead of IE. Maybe that will solve the incessant crashing.......
 
jerry12953 said:
Many thanks for the suggestions, folks.

I will certainly look into the possibility of a SSD. I see that hybrid HD's are now available. Does anyone have any experience with these? Presumably they have a normal HD for storage and a SSD for installing the OS, programs, etc?
Click to expand...


The SSD part of the Hybrid drives is used a cache, so all common files are transferred onto it automatically to speed things up. Some drives have larger cache than others so its worth looking around.

I haven't had any first hand experience of these type of hybrid though.

Have you checked to see if you can mount a 2nd drive inside the computer?
 
Sphinx said:
The SSD part of the Hybrid drives is used a cache, so all common files are transferred onto it automatically to speed things up. Some drives have larger cache than others so its worth looking around.

I haven't had any first hand experience of these type of hybrid though.

Have you checked to see if you can mount a 2nd drive inside the computer?
Click to expand...


I have just checked and it can take 2 x 2.5" drives or 1 x 3.5" drive. At the moment it has the latter so i would have to replace it as well to access the second slot.
 
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All is not lost.. couple of options.

1) If you have a floppy or built in card reader, you may be able remove that and install the primary hard drive in there instead. (And then buy a external USB card reader instead).
2) If you have a eSATA port on the back of your PC - you can buy a 3.5" Drive enclosure and put your 1TB in there - this will give you much faster access to your drive over USB.

Option 1 - would be the my preference, as it would be a neater setup - the only outlay would be, maybe a blanking plate and a external usb card reader and maybe an extra SATA cable.

If you need more help, post some pics up of the PC and also inside the PC.
 
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My surfing PC is a core 2 Quad with 4GB RAM which I speeded up by putting in a Samsung 240GB SSD and did a fresh install of Win 7 64bit.

I also use Seagate external drives for backup:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0084LZI5Y/ref=twister_B00USNHYF8?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

and I also installed a USB3 card:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker®-Uspe...d=1427738511&sr=8-3&keywords=anker+usb3+cards

with an extension of a further 2 USB3 ports to the front panel:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker®-Fron...d=1427738511&sr=8-4&keywords=anker+usb3+cards

This arrangement has given me a much faster and more responsive PC.

Whether it would be fast enough for what you want I don't know as it is used only for surfing with all my editing and video rendering done on an i7 PC with roughly the same arrangement but the USB 3 ports are definitely much faster at transferring files etc.

.
 
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If you're still looking at a external drive, I would go for a networked drive. Slightly more expensive but much more flexible regarding back ups, where it can be located (ie at the end of a very long Ethernet cable)
 
jerry12953 said:
I have a NAS in a separate building for backups......is this what you mean?

But the PC still crashed on opening up from "sleep" this morning, so all is not solved.
Click to expand...

When you say "crashed" what do you mean exactly? Do you get the blue screen of death? Sounds to me like it might be some kind of driver issue, but could be any number of things. I would start by upgrading your graphics driver. Next time you get an error message, write it down fully then spend some time with Google. It might point you in the right direction. It's worth spending some time with that, but a 5+ years old PC is probably getting on a bit. Next step I would suggest would be an OS reinstall. If the specs allow your could try upgrading the OS, but I'd start to consider swapping it for a newer model at that point.
 
It freezes.....is that the same thing? The only way to get things moving is to press the on/off button for 5 secs. and close it down that way, then open up again. No error messages. I thought it might have been IE that was the cause of the problem but it appears not.

OS install sounds a bit drastic!
 
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Could be that the Hard drive is on its way out.

Open a command prompt and type :

CHKDSK /F C:

Say yes if ask to schedule after restart.
 
I've got that ready to start on restarting. Thanks. (Is it the same as defragging?)

i'm beginning to think I'd be better off with a new hard disc anyway - a 2Tb hybrid drive. If and when it is time to replace the PC I could perhaps just swap the HD's.......
 
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Chkdsk is different to defrag. More the same as scandisk.

Let us know the outcome.
 
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