The Ultimate 10 Year Old PC Upgrade Guide

The Ultimate 10 Year Old PC Upgrade Guide 

So you have an old PC lying around that you would like to revive to play the latest games or run the latest applications? Read our guide below to help you achieve this in the best way. 

Depending on your motherboard and RAM type, most of us can go the easiest way by swapping out your current processor with a more powerful processor that supports your current motherboard socket, and by maxing out the RAM slots, you can easily max out your current setup with a small budget, especially if you can find yourself some good deals off Mudah.my or Facebook Groups.  If you decide to go with this route, you won't see major performance improvements, especially if you're working with new applications. But some might find it sufficient for day to day use. We wouldn't recommend going this route though ,because the performance gain compared to rebuilding the whole rig is too small to even worth mentioning.

The other way to get a performance boost, would be getting yourself an SSD hardrive upgrade. SSD hard drives used to cost a lot, but now you can get them for as cheap as RM129 for 128GB.

But How many GBs should you get?

The smallest common SSD size is just 128GB, which is about 25 percent of the capacity of the 500GB hard drives you find on many budget laptops. You can easily fit Windows 10 (20GB), Office 365 (3GB), Chrome (under 500MB installed) and even Photoshop (3.1GB) on such a drive, but the minute you start working with files or even running Windows updates, the drive will fill up quickly. It's also important to note that, if your SSD is more than 75 percent full, performance may suffer. 

So, while you can live with 128GB in a pinch, we recommend getting at least a 250GB SSD. If you play games or work with a lot of media files, you should consider getting a 500GB or larger storage drive, which could add as much as $400 to the cost of your laptop (compared to a hard drive). If you're upgrading an existing laptop to SSD, you may find a 500GB drive for as little as $150.

Some gaming laptops solve this expensive dilemma by coming with both an SSD for key applications and a hard drive for data. Most consumer and business notebooks don't have room for multiple storage drives, but 1TB external USB hard drives cost under $60.

Bottom Line: Get at least a 256GB SSD, 512GB if you do more storage-heavy work.