Do I need a new PC? All your questions answered

"Do I need a new PC?"  

This is the most commonly asked question that I come across in my day to day conversations with my customers. So I thought it may be helpful to give my point of view on the factors involved in making this decision if it’s one you have to make either now or at some time in the future

 The most important aspect to consider is not surprisingly – cost, with the following question top of the list

“How much will the current PC cost to fix / upgrade versus buying a replacement?”

There are a lot of other factors that affect the above question

The age of the current PC – Has it reached a natural end of life?

PC’s are very much like cars and can be thought of in the same way in a lot of respects. The easiest analogy is with a car that is due for an MOT and needs work doing on it for it to get through the MOT.

If you have a car that is worth £600 that needs £700 worth of work to get it through the MOT you have a very similar decision to make as the one you face when trying to keep an old PC running. In this case you will actually end up spending more on the car than it’s actually worth to keep it on the road. Maybe it’s time for a replacement?

Coming back to the PC - a PC bought for £600 about 5 years ago has a natural second hand market value in fully functioning order of approximately £100 - £150, and this value plummets to almost nothing for a non functioning one

So if this PC is broken and needs work to ‘get it back on the road’ you have to remember that the cost of this work should not exceed the market value of it. With the 5 year old £600 PC example we are essentially saying that any more than £150 worth of work is not going to be money well spent.

The flip side of this is that you can if you choose to have this PC up and running for under £150 and it may well fulfil your needs for the next few years. This is money well spent if your current PC was meeting all of your computing needs and is broken. However this takes us to the next factor

Your current usage of the PC – What do you actually do on the PC on a day to day basis? Will This PC fit with your future usage? The PC you bought years ago will have been bought to perform certain tasks which it did just fine when new.

If your computing habits have stayed roughly the same over the years then you have to ask yourself if you ‘need’ to replace the PC with a new one and if so why?

Getting Caught ‘keeping up with the crowd’

Technology marches on at a break neck speed, however it is very easy to get caught up in this and think that you need a new PC when you actually don’t.

If all of your friends and family are talking about this great new PC they have it’s easy to give in and buy a new one when you actually don’t need to

Windows is really not that different now since it was in 1995. Anyone who has used each version will find that as a general rule the PC they have now is very similar to use than the one they had back when windows 95 was released – They all have a start button that you have to click to shut down!

Since then home users have had Windows 98, 2000, ME, XP, VISTA and Windows 7

At every stage in this evolution of windows the minimum specification of the PC needed to run windows has gone up. This has fuelled the PC manufacturing industry, as with every new version of windows users generally upgraded or replaced their PC, which then in turn fuelled the PC manufactures. This cycle has kept people buying new PC’s and new versions of windows for over 16 years and has made the industry and especially Microsoft a lot of money! (more in depth info here)

However in the last few years’ things have changed. Most people with a PC nowadays will have started or used windows XP which still has the largest user base in the world, and this is today, over 10 years after it was released

Why is this? With XP windows generally matured into a very useful and stable PC operating system that generally did everything that people needed it to do for work and play, and for most people it still does.

This was further cemented by the next version of windows (Vista) which is generally regarded as the worst piece of software Microsoft has ever written and released.

Almost no PC capable of running Windows XP was capable of running Vista, so most of the world just decided to sit back and stay with XP, apart from all the people who just naturally decided that it was time for a new PC when Vista was released, they had no real choice, it was Vista or nothing

This is why so many people are still using XP today. However some of the PC’s running this version of windows are up to 10 years old!

It has been quite feasible over the years to keep a PC running XP ticking along nicely with a few upgrades and some good servicing, but at some point there is a good chance that it will fail and the cost of repair could easily make it uneconomical to repair.

So after all this where does that leave us now?

When Microsoft released windows 7 things changed dramatically in this ‘cat and mouse’ game of catch up we’ve all been playing. Windows 7 actually requires a less powerful PC to run than windows Vista. A first in this cycle

This means that it is quite feasible to upgrade a later PC running XP straight to windows 7, skipping the disaster that was Vista to boot!

But again you have to ask yourself why you are upgrading?

On a personal level I still find that Windows XP does everything I need it to do, even though I have newer PC’s running Windows 7 and it has to be said I am a very heavy PC user 

So if you have a later PC running windows XP it may be ok to stay that way for now.

However if you have a PC running windows Vista then it makes perfect sense to upgrade to Windows 7 as it will perform much better and will rid you of an awful piece of software as an additional bonus.

So back to what you do with your PC

Most customers I encounter generally use their PC’s in very similar ways nowadays with the top most common tasks being

• Browsing the internet
• Using email
• Writing reading office documents
• Storing, listening to music and watching internet videos 

So what kind of PC do you need to do this?

Almost any PC that runs windows XP will do these main tasks just fine if it is well looked after and had the odd upgrade over the years.

The general minimum specification for a PC to do these tasks in this modern day is

• A Pentium 4 Processor (including most Celerons and AMD dual core AMD Athlons)
• 1 GB Ram (512kb if you don’t mind a bit of waiting around)
• A reasonably modern graphics card for web videos (iplayer and youtube etc)

As far as Hard disk space goes this is entirely down to the amount of information you are storing (photos, videos etc). This is not a problem as extra storage can be plugged directly in by adding an external USB hard drive 

So if you have a windows XP system that is generally in good working order then you may only need to add a few low cost modifications to keep it running for the foreseeable future 

If you are comfortable swapping RAM and graphics cards this boils down to just the cost of the components, if not then the labour involved in carrying out these modifications does not normally add up to more than an hour  to an hour and a half for fitment and configuration

So on a worst case scenario we can take your old XP pc and bring it up to spec for under £150, which we have already established is the magic number to make this economically viable

There is one thing to bear in mind here and that is the normal working life of windows XP before it grinds to a halt. We find for most users this is around the 3 year mark, and re-installing windows XP is our most common job with our customers PC’s

This is a very tricky and time consuming task, and as such we have come up with a flat rate cost for doing this back at our workshop.

You will receive your PC back ‘as good as new’ with any other work requested added in 

So if you’re thinking of changing your PC then take the above into account as it could save you a lot of money on a new un-needed system, after all you could use that money to put towards your new car!

If you’re not sure what to do get in contact with us and we’ll happily talk you through your options

Thanks for taking the time for reading and I hope this helps you out with any future decisions you make on changing your PC

John Donovan - Managing Director 1st4IT.net