Do you have a 2005-onward vintage computer from which you need to squeeze a few more years of life? Here’s what you do.
- Use crucial.com‘s memory upgrade adviser to figure out what RAM you can buy for it, and order that memory. (If you use their adviser software and the memory you order doesn’t work, you get your money back.)
- When the memory comes, turn it off, open the case, and use a vacuum cleaner to clean out the dust bunnies. Pay special attention to cleaning the fans.
- Install the memory.
- Close the case and start it back up.
- Put Windows 7 on it.
Do you really want to make your vintage computer run better than new? Replace your old disk drive with a Seagate Hybrid drive. These are partly plain old disk drive and partly solid-state hard drive. Clone your old hard drive onto the new one. This can be tricky; instructions and software are here. Then swap out your old drive for the new one.
NOTE: If you have licensed software like Apple iTunes or Adobe products, you may need to deactivate your software licenses before you swap out the old drive and reactivate them after you start using the new one: those products may think you’re trying to install the same software on a different computer if you don’t.
Why is this a good idea?
For years computer processors were subject to Moore’s Law. A generation ago Gordon Moore of Intel figured out that you’d be able to buy twice as much computer power for the same money every eighteen months. Software makers jumped on this bandwagon and so software bloated up as computer hardware prices declined.
But, around about 2007 computer processors stopped getting dramatically faster. Moore’s Law, the law of dropping prices, started being felt most strongly in the cost of disk drives and RAM. So, if you buy a new computer you don’t get something that’s much faster, but it will have more storage and more RAM. You can get the same deal by upgrading an older computer. So, why not?
I really appreciate this trip down memory lane! Your point about deactivating software licenses before swapping drives is something people constantly overlook, and it saves such a massive headache with customer support later on. I’ve been “squeezing life” out of old hardware for years, particularly for home lab projects.
Actually, I just recently repurposed an old small-form-factor machine as a dedicated 2-port security appliance https://serverorbit.com/network-devices/security-appliance/2-port-en. By maxing out the RAM and swapping in a small SSD, it handles basic firewall duties and traffic filtering for my home network better than many cheap modern routers. It’s incredibly satisfying to take a machine that was headed for the landfill and turn it into a functional piece of network infrastructure. A 2-port setup is perfect for a simple WAN/LAN gateway, and it’s a great way to learn about networking without spending a fortune on new enterprise gear.
That said, with the cost of electricity rising, do you think there’s a point where the power draw of these older “vintage” machines eventually outweighs the savings of not buying a more efficient, modern micro-PC?
By my calculation, a ten-watt device drawing power continuously costs about US$30 per year to operate when power costs US$0.35 per kWh.
So, you’d have to work out the cost-benefit tradeoff of a newer, hopefully cooler-running device vs. keeping an older one. There’s a gadget called a kill-a-watt that tracks power consumption if you need to measure that.