Upgrade options on test

If your computer is two or three years old, it is likely to seem a bit slow, be low on storage space and make the latest games look like a series of still pictures.

This presents you with a choice. Buying a new PC is as easy as taking out your credit card, but upgrading your current PC could save you hundreds of pounds.

The most difficult thing about upgrading a PC is working out which upgrade offers the most significant benefit for the least amount of money. There's a fine line between good value and money down the drain, and Computeractive is here to help you find that fine line.

Upgrade tests
When testing the effects of different upgrades, there is no point using a new computer. Instead, we built a computer, which is roughly equivalent to what would have been on the market two or three years ago. It had 128MB of memory, a 1GHz AMD Athlon processor, a GeForce2 MX400 graphics card and a 20GB hard disk.

It used Windows Me as the operating system. In our labs, the best in Europe, we tested its performance before and after each upgrade with the benchmark tests we use for our reviews of new PCs.

Memory master
Regardless of what you use your computer for, one thing they all like is extra memory. Memory is very important to a PC as it is used to store all the programs and files that you have open, as well as Windows itself.

The problem is that Windows can be quite poor at managing memory and as you open and close files and applications, the amount of memory that is available gradually 'leaks' away. This is often the reason why you have to restart your PC if you have left it running all day. Windows can then clear the memory out completely when you start your PC again.

In Windows 98 and Me, there is no point having more than 512MB as the operating system can't do a lot with it, but we consider 128MB to be the absolute minimum. In Windows XP, memory over 512MB can be used but is only necessary for demanding tasks such as games, editing large photos and video editing. Although 128MB is the minimum here, 256MB is more comfortable.

Our test computer is pretty typical, running Windows Me with 128MB of memory. We tested the computer in standard trim and then tested it again after doubling the amount of memory to 256MB. Adding an extra 128MB of memory to our PC cost £20 from Crucial and our reward was a 13 per cent performance increase.

Bearing in mind how simple it is to fit extra memory, and the low cost, it's apparent that a memory upgrade would benefit most users.

With memory being so affordable, we also tested our PC with four times the memory, upgrading to 512MB. As our PC had only two memory slots, the cheapest solution was to discard our original memory and buy two 256MB memory chips at a cost of £35.

This £70 upgrade earned us an increase of 19 per cent, which is obviously very welcome. However, four times the memory doesn't mean four times the performance.

Game plan
A walk around your local PC superstore will show you that there is a bewildering array of graphics cards on the shelves to tempt your money from your wallet. A couple of years ago, graphics cards based on the nVidia GeForce2 MX400 graphics chip were very respectable performers and to be honest they can still cope with quite a few of today's games if they are configured to best advantage.

As our test PC has an AGP slot, upgrading to a better graphics card was a simple matter of swapping one card for another. The fastest graphics cards can cost up to £400, but in anything other than a computer with a very fast processor, they will not perform at their maximum. Putting a £400 graphics card in a two-year-old PC is like putting racing tyres on a Morris Minor. They'll work but you won't see any benefit from them.

In tests to monitor the overall system performance, our £100 graphics card had no effect whatsoever, which pushes a graphics card firmly to the bottom of effective upgrades for a slow computer. In our 3D graphics tests, however, the result was, just as expected, very different. A graphics card is almost exclusively used for games and you can see the massive 141 per cent leap in performance in our 3D test.

This puts the latest games in reach of our test computer at a price that is far more reasonable than a new computer. Our new card also featured a second monitor socket for connecting up an extra display.

Hard driving
The next upgrade on our list was a hard disk. PC owners don't tend to replace hard disks because they are affecting the performance of their computer but because they are running out of space.

Installing a new hard disk as an extra storage device is simple but it gets slightly more complicated if you want to transfer Windows and all your files from your old hard disk to the new unit. Software such as Norton Ghost will copy your hard disk contents file for file but it is a good idea to bite the bullet and install Windows from scratch.

This will give you a chance to dump all that old software that you have tried out and decided that you don't really like.

Our test PC was equipped with a 20GB hard disk, which is very modest by modern standards. We opted for a model ten times the size of the one we had. Our 200GB hard disk came courtesy of Western Digital but you can get similar models from Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung and Seagate, and they offer incredible value for money.

Our 200GB hard disk cost £215 and it is easy to find even cheaper storage for less than £1 per GB.Before you go too mad with your hard disk capacities, however, you should check your computer's handbook or the manufacturer's website to ensure your PC can handle a large hard disk.

Some PCs have a hard disk size limit of 33GB, while more elderly ones may struggle with anything larger than 8GB. It's worth checking before you buy to avoid a complicated set up.

In our tests, our new hard disk gave us a performance boost of around eight per cent, which isn't to be sniffed at. On a performance per pound basis, that eight per cent isn't so great, but a similar performance gain would be had from any modern hard disk.

As we've already mentioned though, the real benefit of the new disk is the extra storage capacity it offers.

Windows wiper
Upgrades don't come any simpler than software and upgrading Windows can have more of an effect on performance than you'd think. In a computer as old as our test PC, the version of Windows is likely to be Windows Me or 98. Whichever you have, you can buy the upgrade to Windows XP Home for about £85.

Traditionally though, newer operating systems demand lots of power to work and can make PCs that were perfectly happy running older software seem sluggish. We ran our tests on out PC running Windows Me and then again running Windows XP and the results were surprising.

Our tests showed that upgrading our PC to Windows XP improved performance dramatically. We observed an increase of 26 per cent in general system performance when switching to Windows XP, which is more than the difference observed when doubling the memory.

We also got a 21 per cent boost in graphics performance by switching operating systems, but that is unlikely to be enough to postpone a graphics card upgrade if you can't play the games you want to.

Although these results suggest that Windows XP is some kind of elixir, it should be qualified. Our test PC is actually about the minimum specification we'd recommend for Windows XP. If your PC has a processor much less than 1GHz, Windows XP may struggle a little and anything less than 128MB of memory simply isn't enough to work with.

That said, if your PC can stand it, Windows XP is well worth buying. As well as providing support for FireWire and USB 2 straight out of the box, it sweeps all previous versions of Windows aside in the reliability stakes too. If your PC and software will stand it, Windows XP is an excellent performance upgrade.

The final battle
Ultimately, the decision about whether to upgrade or simply replace your old computer will come down to performance speed. If your computer has a processor of 300MHz or below and it's struggling to do what you want, the time has come for a complete transplant.

Above 300MHz, a memory upgrade should speed up most aspects of your work, particularly if you work with lots of applications open at once. A hard disk upgrade will give you as much storage as you require and possibly a small performance boost, but upgrading graphics cards and operating systems is best left to PCs with 800MHz processors or above.

If all the upgrades were applied to our system, the increase in system performance would be around 46 per cent, which is huge, but the cost would just over £400. This could be reduced by getting a smaller hard disk than the 200GB version that we chose and ditching the graphics card as this didn't really affect system performance.

The performance gain would still be impressive but the price would be below £300, which is much cheaper than buying a brand-new PC.

Overall, the best value upgrade in terms of percentage performance gain per pound has to be memory. Our £20 upgrade earned us a 13 per cent performance increase. Switching operating systems to Windows XP was the next best upgrade, getting twice the performance gain of the memory upgrade at an impressive 26 per cent increase in performance but costing more than four times as much.

Whichever upgrade you decide upon, though, our selection of cheap and efficient options will ensure you are not left out of pocket.

Heart transplant
The only way to totally transform the performance of your PC is by giving it a complete overhaul and ditching the old processor. Upgrading your processor is a guaranteed way to increase the performance of your PC.

If you replace, say, Intel's 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 then you simply remove the heatsink and old processor and fit the new parts. You may possibly have to enter the BIOS (software built into all PCs to control the basic operation of devices such as the screen, hard disk and keyboard) to adjust your PC to its new speed but this job only takes a couple of minutes.

It is far more likely, however, that you will want to upgrade by a generation or two of processor, say from Pentium II to Pentium 4, or from an old AMD K6 to an Athlon. This is rather more complicated and expensive, and involves a new motherboard and processor and probably some new memory too.

The processor is the expensive part so once you have decided how much speed you need and how big your budget is, you will be able to select a processor quite easily. Next you have to choose an appropriate motherboard, which is when you want a trusted supplier or a knowledgeable friend.

To add to the complication, you may find that your old power supply is incompatible with the new parts.

In many ways upgrading your motherboard, processor and memory is like building a new PC but the results are well worth the effort. This upgrade will certainly cost you £200 and could easily costy as much as £500, but the result should be a 200 per cent increase in performance.

Gathering forces
We've covered the core components of your PC in this feature but no doubt you've spotted that there are lots of parts that we haven't mentioned which can have a significant effect on your PC. More importantly they also have an influence on how you use your PC.

Take, for instance, the CD-RW drive. Perhaps you only have a CD-Rom and can't write to CD at all, or you have an old and clunky 8-speed CD-R drive.

A new 52-speed CD-RW drive will cost less than £50 and will write a full 650MB of data in less than four minutes. Then we have the monitor, mouse and keyboard.

These are the parts of the PC that you interact with, so even a small improvement can make a world of difference. If you still have an old mouse with a ball that gets clogged with fluff and dust, give an optical mouse a try.

While you're at it, get a mouse with a scroll wheel so you can move up and down web pages easily. You'll also find that a new keyboard is much easier to use than the horrid old thing that you've been spilling coffee and cola on for the past five years.

A new keyboard will have a much smoother action and will probably also have a row of hot keys that you can program as short cuts.

AMD
www.amd.com

Crucial
www.crucial.com/uk

Dabs
www.dabs.com

Hitachi
www.hgst.com

Intel
www.intel.com

Maxtor
www.maxtor.com

Microsoft
www.microsoft.co.uk

nVidia
www.nvidia.com

Samsung
www.samsungelectronics.co.uk

Seagate
www.seagate.com

Western Digital
www.westerndigital.com