I am definitely not a computer geek but some upgrading is easy to do yourself:
Need for speed and storage
My computer is four years old and running a bit slow. I hadn't realized how slow until a member of the family showed me their new laptop and the speed that they could do things. And so I realized that something needed to be done.
There were two problems. I have a huge collection of photos and they are clogging up my hard drive. So I needed a way of storing them off the hard drive. Secondly the programs wee taking along time to run and load - this is a sign that the computer is lacking RAM. RAM (random access memory) is the size of brain power that the computer can call on at any one time to perform what you want it to do. My first computer had a minuscule RAM and my present one has 256MB but today that is small. I run Windows XP but to run Vista in its most basic version they recommend a minimum of 1 GB RAM.
Easy to fix
Both these problems are easy to fix. Lets deal with the storage first. My computer has a fast 54x CD player in it. This is great for loading programs and was state of the art when I bought the system but it is now out of date. DVDs have mostly replaced CDs for computer storage. They can hold much larger amount of information and also can be used for multi media such as storing video clips. I was attracted by the idea of saving my entire collection of several thousand photos onto one DVD.
Unplug the old and plug in the new
What makes it easy to take out the old CD drive and put in a new DVD writer drive is that there is an industry standard. To put it very simply they all have the same plugs in the back and are all the same size and so you should be able to take the back off, take one drive out, put the other one in , put the plugs into the same sockets in the back and then start it up and off it goes. Windows XP on my machine recognized the new hardware and the disk supplied with it made it simple to install. So there it is.
Undo the screws, take out the three lugs ( one for the power, one for the sound and one wide ribbon with loads of pins that connects the drive to the main board on the computer and plug them carefully back into the same holes in the new one. I am not a techie person but I did this first time and it worked. Be careful - there is a little plug on the back of most drives which you have to set to either master or slave. If you are replacing an existing drive just make sure that it is the same setting as the one that you are taking out.
Problem
The only problem I had was that the floppy disk drive didn't work after I put the side back on. This caused a hic up in the boot program - this means it didn't start properly. I took the side off and found that I had accidentally knocked the power plug out of the back of the floppy disk drive when I put the new DVD drive in. A simple but silly mistake so be careful not to pull any plugs out accidentally.
Its all modules
You can see from this a computer is all made up of modules. They are all attached to the motherboard where the main processing chip is located. This can be seen as it will have a big fan on top of it as there processors can get very hot. The RAM memory is plugged directly into the motherboard.
Adding RAM
With my computer I had a motherboard handbook. This have details of the number of slots available to add extra RAM. The specification told me I had 2 DDM slots and only one of them was used and had a 256MB ram card plugged into it. I took the side off the computer and located the empty slot. I looked at the spec on the existing ram and the max possible in the handbook. I looked online at my favorite computer components supplier and found a special deal on exactly the same Kingston 256DDM ram so I bought another one the same.
In older computers you used to have to have pairs of matching RAM cards but with DDM you can put in any combination. So for under £10 ($20US) I doubled my RAM to 512MB. (the handbook said the motherboard could accept a maximum of 2GB RAM but these are much more expensive and I didn't have that amount of money to spend on an upgrade at this time. When adding RAM into an empty slot there should be nothing else to do as the computer will recognize the RAM instantly and start working faster immediately.
I surprised myself
So with little technical knowledge and for very little money I have transformed my four year old desktop computer. And the most amazing thing is that for a non technical person like myself it was relatively easy and worked first time.
