Many consumers do not realize that when manufacturers, put their computer designs together they have a range of parts the motherboard will be able to use.
These parts will either make the computer just ok or awesome. The price spread on the parts is about $20.00 to $25.00 the difference between the just ok and awesome, per part. Would you pay $25.00, plus cost, to have your just ok computer upgraded to awesome? In many cases, that’s what it comes to.
The parts choices range from a solid-state or platter drive, more or less slow or faster RAM, CPU, and video card. So, some computer manufacturers are using parts that on the sales floor perform good with just the operating system and a few demo programs. When the consumer starts to load software and data, that’s when they start to say the computer is getting slow. There are several ways to make your computer faster where it does not slow down, ever.
There are two components that will make a really big impact. Replacing the platter drive with a solid-state drive, SSD, and more RAM.
Last week we had a laptop in house, from one of our customers, that was having issues with the Blue Screen of Death, periodically. Looking at the event log, clued us into the idea, the platter drive was failing. There are three commonly used drive speeds manufactures can choose from when they source parts:
- 5400 RPM
- 7200 RPM
- Solid-State – is measured in megabytes per second, MB’s.
When manufactures are putting drives into computers they typically choose 5400 RPM, and that is what this one was. We re-imaged the computer and put Windows10 back on the system exactly as it was and replaced the failing platter with the SSD. When the computer booted, it was noticeably faster and the user noticed right away, and said, “Wow.”
More RAM is better up to a point. So, it depends on what you’re going to do with the computer. If you are going to do virtualization with it, then more RAM the better. If you’re a support professional having lots of different windows open and running diagnostics more RAM is probably in order.
What we have found in our practice, is at the 16gig level of RAM and an SSD you get a really smooth-running computer, it seems to be the sweet spot. We have about 90 computer builds, among our customers, in the Chicago area.
Initially, these systems were loaded with Windows7, and now being upgraded to Windows10. We got about two-thirds done, and the ones that are done are working great with no changes needed to keep them current to Windows10, they just keep working.