Why buy a new PC? Upgrades do the job

From...

By Edward N. Albro

NEW YORK (IDG) -- Parsimonious PC users have reason to cheer at last week's PC Expo (now part of the TechX NY trade show in New York), where a number of vendors are proving once again that you don't have to trade in your tired old system to get a boost of new computing power.

The new products, which make processor upgrades easier, provide new storage space, and accelerate file access, can breathe new life into PCs that would otherwise end up on the scrap heap.

That should be welcome news among today's PC users, who are clearly watching their pennies. PC vendors have dropped prices dramatically in recent months, but consumers still aren't buying. Earlier this month, the research firm IDC projected that PC sales in the United States would drop 17.3 percent in 2001.

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Clearly, lots of computer users are deciding to make do. But that doesn't mean they have to put up with poky performance, even if their system has a CPU that's half a decade or more old.

New system on a card

Upgrading the CPU on older machines can be difficult because older motherboards often won't accommodate newer processors. And replacing the motherboard is a tricky job that many users don't want to tackle.

PowerLeap's Renaissance/370S addresses the problem by providing a full motherboard that simply plugs into a computer's ISA card slot. Once the Renaissance board is in place, the user simply connects cables to the hard drive, floppy drive, and other components. The old motherboard is rendered inoperative, but it doesn't need to be removed from the machine.

The Renaissance can move a system running a stone-age 286 into the 21st century with a 1-GHz Intel Pentium III chip and as much as 256MB of SDRAM for $470. A board with a 766-MHz Celeron II chip and 128 MB of memory sells for $270. The boards also have integrated graphics and sound support and a built-in ethernet controller.

Of course, the upgrade only makes sense if the hard drive and other parts of a system are still useful.

"You have to look at what else you have in there," says Powerleap President Nathaniel H. Dahl. "If you have crappy everything in there, you just need to [buy a new PC]."

Getting gigs to go

Skimpy storage is another limitation that can push PC owners toward buying a new system. But PC Expo is full of new external storage mechanisms, including the Peerless disk drive from Iomega, makers of the Zip disk.

The 10GB or 20GB disks sit in a base station that connects to a PC through either a USB or IEEE 1394 (Firewire) connection. Removed from the base stations, the drives are about the size and weight of a paperback book and are rugged enough to be carted around from one system to another. The drives survived drops of up to 30 inches in Iomega's tests, according to product manager David Greenhalgh.

In fact, Iomega is demonstrating the Peerless in an SUV, streaming video to three small LCD screens and music to two sets of headphones. Iomega estimates a 20GB drive can hold up to 45 hours of near-DVD quality video or 700 hours of near-CD quality digital audio.

A base station and 20GB disk sells for $399. A base station with a 10GB disk retails for $359.

One potential drawback for Peerless is its data transfer rate, which is just 1MB per second with a USB connection. With an IEEE 1394 connection, though, that rate goes up to 15MB per second.

Easing the frag lag

When an old system seems to be moving slower than molasses going uphill in January, most users' first thoughts go to new hardware -- upgrading their processors, buying more memory, or even scrapping their machines for newer models.

But sometimes the answer is as simple as doing a little housekeeping. Executive Software's Diskeeper 6.0 Second Edition, the latest update of the popular software, is a simpler way to do the job people so often neglect -- defragmenting hard drives.

A fragmented drive can have a serious impact on performance, Executive Software spokesperson Rudi Loehwing says, slowing a machine by 20 percent to as much as 80 percent.

Most Windows systems come with a defragmenter, of course. But using the application can be time-consuming and inconvenient.

Diskeeper operates three to five times faster than the Windows defragger, Loehwing says. It also can be scheduled to run regularly at a time when a computer is idle. It can even be set to decide for itself when defragmentation is necessary and can perform the operation in the background without affecting the speed of other applications, Loehwing adds.

Priced at $50, that's a pretty reasonable way to breathe new life into your trusty beige box.