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Upgrade 101 - Introduction

Copyright © Myles White, 1999

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A few weeks ago, I outlined a plan that Fast Forward's editor, Rob Wright and I were kicking around: a series of articles on installing various hardware devices. In addition to providing shopping tips and product reviews, our suggestion was that we'd feature detailed instructions aimed at novice computer owners to help install memory, hard drives, other storage devices, external peripherals such as printers and scanners and so on. I asked for your feedback.

The response was, to put it mildly, enthusiastic. For example, Rich Clee's message was unambiguous: "The plan you've been discussing with your editor sounds plenty good to me. You asked for reader feedback. Mine says - go for it."

We got suggestions, too. Vidya Ayyar and Paul Leduc both want to know more about setting up a simple local area network for home. Charles Philip wrote to ask about upgrading processors and hard drives. Arthur Whelan is interested in disk space maintenance, upgrades, add-ons, and the differences between Celeron, Pentium, and AMD processors.

Several very good suggestion came from Paul Dunphy who wrote, "Perhaps it's the engineer in me, but this sounds like a great idea, and I hope that you and Mr. Wright decide to go through with it.

"Perhaps you could include the level of difficulty (say from 1=easy to 10= "you'd better know what you're doing"), approximate cost or cost range, and some tips that experienced persons like yourself may have picked up along the way, but are often not well-documented in instruction manuals."

Based on your responses, we've decided to go ahead with the new series, beginning next week and we're going to incorporate all of these suggestions.

The plan

I've asked Markham-based Grey-Tech Computers (905-470-1425 or www.greytech.com) to provide me with the appropriate equipment - a startup PC system using older or generic components and the upgrade parts we'll need as we proceed. We'll start by assessing the system using Windows Magazine's WinTune 98 to give us an objective assessment of its performance. Then over the next 10 weeks, we'll slowly upgrade the system to see if we can improve it. Along the way, we'll detail the procedures for installing the various parts, discuss some shopping tips for the various alternatives, and - when the problems are commonly encountered - detail some trouble-shooting suggestions as well. At irregular points during the series, I'll be writing additional Computer Wares columns to answer reader questions that arise as we proceed.

The tentative schedule and broad outline of the topics is as follows:

Sept. 23 - section front: The main topic will be installing a second hard drive - level of difficulty 2 out of 4. By necessity, because this is the first in the series, we'll include a number of short side articles on static protection, basic tools required (with pictures for both), several popular methods used by manufacturers to get into the case and some notes on BIOSes. Other potential sidebars include ATA v/s SCSI (and an attempt to clarify the terms, IDE, EIDE, ATA, UltraDMA, and UltraATA that will come back to haunt us when we discuss CD and DVD-ROM drive upgrades later), and formatting and partitioning.

Sept. 30 - Basic maintenance inside the box (sucking up dust bunnies, etc.) and cleaning a mouse - difficulty level 1. We'll use this opportunity to identify some of the items you'll find under the hood of a typical modern PC, including details of the motherboard (expansion slots, memory slots, processor slot, AGP slot, chipset, drive connectors, external port connectors and various data cables).

Oct. 7 - Adding more memory. Difficulty level 3 (for shopping, not for installing - that's actually level 1). We'll identify the basic physical forms that memory takes, detail the things you need to get right before you shop and we'll also talk about the memory market and prices.

Oct. 14 - Replacing a graphics controller - difficulty level 2. We'll also discuss MPEG decoder boards, accelerator daughter cards, graphics memory and how the motherboard's chipset affects what you can use in your system.

Oct. 28 - Upgrading CD-ROM to CD-RW or to DVD-ROM; installing internal Zip and SuperDisk (LS-120) drives. Difficulty level 2.

Nov. 4 - Adding external peripherals. Difficulty level 1. Main graphic shows back of computer with ports labelled, discussion of drivers, parallel port conflicts, SCSI ID settings, USB limitations.

Nov. 11 - Upgrading sound or other cards (removing old circuit boards, adding new ones, and some of the trickier bits associated with these tasks). Difficulty level 2.

Nov. 18 - Setting up a simple home peer-to-peer network using Windows 9x and Ethernet. Includes installing Network Interface cards, the affects that might have on a cable or ADSL setup and includes some discussion of alternatives (e.g., wireless, use of house AC lines, Applica U2).

Nov. 25 - What you can do with an old pre-MMX Pentium system; upgrading from Celeron to Pentium II/III, and from Pentium MMX to AMD K6-2 or K6-III. We'll talk about AT v/s ATX motherboard form factors and what this means for your existing case as well as what is meant by a Socket 7 v/s Slot 1 motherboard. Difficulty level 3.

Dec. 2. - Swapping motherboards - difficulty level 4. What you can do with an old 486 or early Pentium system with AT-style case. We'll also try to get our hands on AMD's new Athlon processor and appropriate motherboard.

Note: in the descriptions above, in order to save space, I've used a number of acronyms and jargon abbreviations without explaining them. Please don't panic; all such will be fully explained whenever they're used in the series.

Why bother?

You can do anything if you have enough time or enough money, but face it; none of the people I know have enough of either commodity - particularly money. Sure, I'd like to get a new computer whenever something faster arrives, but in that regard, I'm just like you - I can't afford a new system every year or every two years. I'm lucky if I can scrape together enough to get one every five years. And even then I'm unlikely to be able to afford to get one that has the best of every component on the market, the largest capacity storage alternatives or the most memory it can handle.

That means, in order to keep my equipment current enough to continue to evaluate new software and hardware products that run in it or attach to it, I have to upgrade my existing system as I go along.

One of the adages that has been true for a long time in the computer industry is that "What Intel giveth, Microsoft (and others) taketh away." It seems as though each time the technology improves to provide an increase in hardware performance, software developers have quickly used up all the 'oomph' with bloated software code and increased feature sets that quickly bring your existing hardware to its knees. Data files get larger, requirements for memory increase, and faster processor cycles somehow go down the drain.

This is great for hardware vendors. They'd like you to buy a new computer every couple of years, but that simply isn't in the cards for most of us. The result is that there is a healthy retail market for upgrade components. Depending on the product category retail sales to the "retrofit" market can account for as much as 40 per cent of a manufacturer's annual sales. You can add larger hard drives to your existing system to hold more software or larger files, increase the amount of memory in the system, and get faster graphics controllers and CD-ROM drives. New telecommunications technologies are emerging almost monthly, sound controllers get better with each new release - and so it goes.

The trick here for someone who is seriously into using their computer is to put the day when they have to get a complete new one as far off into the future as possible - but this doesn't mean you have to live with the eventual limitations of the system you first bought for all the time you have it. The key part of the upgrade strategy is to do it as you go along over time instead of waiting for everything to be out of date. Building a new computer out of individual components at retail prices will cost you more than buying a complete system off the shelf (markup on individual components is higher) - and that's not counting the cost of your time. Simply, if in order to upgrade your system, you have to replace enough components to rebuild your old computer with the leftovers, you'll pay too much.

However, if the additions and upgrades to your system are done over the space of a few years, not only will your system force fewer limitations on you, but you stretch the cash flow out.

Next week, the journey begins.

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