Old PC Upgrade #1: Options & RAM 

I find it personally annoying that people such as Christopher put time and effort into creating content and then people automatically just click the 'thumb down' button out of spite. Video was up for one minute and it got a dislike. Impossible for that person to have watched any of the 20-min video to form an opinion. Great work Christopher and certainly a great explanation to anyone young or old who are starting off with PC upgrades.

When I was a kid, Sundays meant waiting for the Top 30 on the radio. Now it means waiting for a notification from Chris.

Stage 1 complete on my PC 👍. Upgraded from 3 to 8 of GB RAM. Very happy with speed increase. The dust and fluff blocking the processor fan was a sight to behold. No wonder the fan was running so readily! All clean now and eagerly anticipating delivery of a SSD for stage 2. Thanks for your encouragement and advice.

Can’t believe 2010 was 11 years ago. Feels like 5 years ago for me.

"Come on Google Chrome, you can do it!" (Motivational quotes from Chris)

This is actually an excellent idea! Since the beginning of people working at home, I've been offering SSD and RAM upgrades to my friends and family's computer's/ laptops so they don't have to buy an entire new PC! Great video as always Chris, stay safe!

A *very* good vid - specifically because the type of person that only has a 2010-era PC often needs a lot of step-by-step advice on upgrading and has limited funds to do it and will be prone to massive cockups/incompatabilitly mistakes.

This is something I love doing. I'm interested in seeing your choices to complete the upgrade

I love simple videos like this, no jargon and straight to the point! You've made my Sunday!

What you call "an old PC" is what my 84 year old dad calls his "new PC". LOL

Greetings from Sweden. These videos, upgrading older PC's, are very satisfying to watch. Can't really explain why... My father passed away not long ago and I "inherited" his _very old_ HP desktop from 2009. Just for fun, during a weekend, I cleaned it, upgraded everything I could (kept the motherboard though). * New Corsair 430 W modular power supply. * More and faster RAM sticks. * Better and faster AMD CPU. * Samsung 860 EVO SSD, 500 GB (overkill, I know, but I had a few on the shelf). * Dedicated ASUS 730 GTX GPU with 2 GB GDDR5 memory. * Windows 10 (the machine came with Windows 7) * New cable management. * SATA DVD-ROM instead of the old IDE one... Believe it or not but my dad's old PC starts in 30 sec now and shuts down in 10 sec. It is responsive as h-ll, a perfect PC to surf on and use for lighter use. I gave it to my 81 year old mother and she is happy with it.

The anti-static wrap fitted easily around a radiator, but I found the clamp a bit painful on my skin during the upgrade.

Honestly hearing Chris wittering on is one the loveliest things of this channel. Background music instead of him would be a serious downgrade. Lol

since it's DDR3, you have a couple of options. 1) use 2x8gb ddr3 to max it out to 16gb. it's possible on the chipset. just not documented on the spec sheet 2) if you can try to play around and modify the bios file to allow it to --- use nvme via pci>nvme adaptor and boot natively on a faster than sata nvme native storage... then you might eke out more performance.

I have that PC case! My parents bought it for my brother and I from Tradex when we were teenagers, it had a much older configuration back then running windows Xp on a single core. It came bundled with a monitor, all the peripherals and two giant boxes of edutainment shovelware. It really blew our minds being able to use the internet at home!

This is literally the same specs as my uncle's pc that he's asking me advice on upgrading, thank you for making this video!

Absolutely the BEST presentation on the subject! Should be required-viewing...from schools to retirement homes :-) Clear vocals, superb visuals, complete technicals, references to further details,.... Should win an Oscar, if tbere was such a category (or if I watched TV)))! Thank you, from the many who appreciate this achievement, but lack the civility of telling you so. Buona fortuna, in all you do!

Older computers like these make for great budget systems to be used as thin client devices. I have retired nearly all of my Core 2 Duo era systems from traditional use and migrated them over to thin client duties and they're still doing great. They also make for decent NAS systems. My NAS is based on a Dell OptiPlex 755 from 2008, and apart from a failing PSU it's doing great.

I have a computer from 2011 (that's the date on the BIOS, at any rate) but it was a pretty high-end box in 2011: 16GB of RAM, 4-core (8 threads) i7-2700K CPU at 3.5GHz and dual 1TB drives in software RAID. It's my living-room computer and very usable still, though running Debian and not Windows. I really don't understand people who get new computers every 3-5 years. I find even 10-year-old computers still perfectly fine.

I love these videos. The joy of making old hardware entirely usable just can't be beat. In preparation for the end of Ubuntu's 32 bit support, I've switched from Linux lite to running antix off a live usb, with "toram" boot option. Have another usb to which I copy any important files after encrypting with python script, then sync them to a one drive account using the "abraunegg" project. Got other scripts to do other stuff. I would never have thought in 2004 when I bought this machine I would be using it ( not exclusively ) 17 years later with a couple of usb sticks sticking out of it, no HDD, with a beaming grin on my face constantly, in a world where a lot of people will tell you that a new PC is obselete in a few years.

Definitely needs a zip drive, and a 72x DVD rewriter with lightscribe. So many people leave those essential upgrades out.

Explaining computers is my favorite comfort youtube channel! Especially because I am enthusiastic about computers myself.

With hardware stocks across the world being critically low (laptops, graphics card, monitors, processors, only SSD's and RAM are somewhat available to me atm), it's definitely a good idea to consider all of the old hardware we have laying around. I see so many machines forgotten, neglected and collecting dust in the archives of companies and homes, it's a crime not to put them to use. Getting a Win10 key is about 10-15 euros if you google right, a fully featured O365 for home or professional users is about as cheap as your netflix account and both run pretty wel on upgraded motherboards from a decade ago. With some PCI-Express bays there might even be room for a neglected GTX### that could get you Minecraft or Fortnite going. I find great joy in giving new life to an old machine, with parts from derelict machines. Great video!

Additional static charge dissipation technique is to first grasp the computer case to equalize the charge between yourself and the goodies inside the case. If using a wrist strap connect the alligator clip the the computer case. When handling the motherboard, ram and drives outside of the case always equalize the charge the same way before installing and connecting cables.

I love watching videos like this just because they oftentimes create even more connections to a subject I thought I already knew a ton about. Great work, Chris :)

Not only is the machine really neat and clean but it's a socket 775 board with DDR3 slots. Not as rare as hen's teeth but not that easy to find for a reasonable price in my experience. Nice catch 😊

I recently did an upgrade to a system of similar age and specs. My sister needed a system for teaching distant learning classes that could offer more capabilities than her issued chrome book. I upgraded it to a Core 2 Quad, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and a Radeon HD 6750; it runs like a dream for a desktop I originally bought in 2009. I wouldn’t try to do anything intensive like video editing or games on it, but it is perfect for teaching online classes.

What a perfect introductory video to PC upgrading. Even as a seasoned veteran for the PCMR I appreciate the effort and attention to detail this has gone into. A well worthwhile series to keep an eye.

I need to share this with a friend. He is completely out of this world....An SSD could improve speed by boot times

That's a very nice system for this project. Perfect start for the absolute beginner who had no idea they weren't necessarily stuck with whatever came with the PC, or that its performance can be radically improved at little expense. Especially so when starting with a flexible case and a good motherboard, as this one does. Upgrade CPU and give it a small heatpipe cooler, swap the mechanical HD for an SSD, and give it a USB3 add-on card, and it'll be ready for a long and useful new life. You could even go all out and give it an M.2 drive on a PCIe adapter card, and perhaps a Blu-ray optical drive! I've got several of this class myself (some still in everyday use) and more RAM is definitely the best first step. I've also found that a quad-core CPU makes a big difference -- mainly that CPU-intensive apps don't get clogged up near as easily. (By about a factor of four compared to the core2duo CPU, even tho the latter had a higher clock speed.) Great way to start my morning!

Thank you for doing this, I’ve never been able to get a PC so I’m hoping to upgrade my family’s old one, and this is really helping.

Another top tip... Before attaching your anti-static wrist strap, always discuss using a "safe word".

For comparison, when you put in the new SSD, please put back the original 2GB of memory. This way, we can see which upgrade benefited which type of computer usage. Which one helped boot time the most, and which one helped applications launching the most, and are the differences significant? Of course, then that should all be compared to having both the memory uprade + the SSD upgrade. Thank you.

Absolutely brilliant! I was soo waiting for something like this. I hope you fit a graphics card inside and see which games would it be able to run.

Great video, Mr. Barnatt. Even though I'm a computer techie and so I'm already used to the ways of upgrading old machines, it's still a very interesting episode to watch.

This thorough explanation of the upgrade options available and what goes with what is basically non-existent anywhere else on RU-vid. Thank you SO MUCH you've helped me understand exactly how to tackle upgrading old PCs

In São Paulo - Brazil we normally use those OLD PC in Point-of-sale. It works very well for it... but with Linux. Very good infos...

One thing to add, when upgrading memory often you will find the slots are full of dust, so a can of contact cleaner is very useful, and often a non woven wipe soaked with it used to gently clean the inside of the slot and the memory module will result in good contact, as you wipe off the dust and the film of dirt that has built up there. Same for adding in cards, the slot can easily have a build up of dirt in it, which is not visible easily, but a spray and wipe with the non woven cloth and contact cleaner does wonders.

Oh my god, I have that exact same cabinet. I never let it go cause it was a gift from my uncle. Mine was originally an eSys branded prebuilt with a P4 2.66ghz, 256 mb ram, an 80gb HDD and a CD only drive. Later upgrades included an additional DVD burner, an nVidia 6200LE and 512mb extra ram. Now its running an old i3 system harvested from another PC.

I legit upgraded my old rig after watching this. Replaced E2160 1.8GHz cpu with Pentium E6600 3.06GHz by just changing motherboard and keeping other parts. It cost me 20$ total. I'm very happy how it turned out, thanks for this video.

Excellent content once again, I have been doing PC upgrades for years and never knew you could use faster memory than the MB states. Thanks, a gem of info for a Sunday evening here in Denmark :-)

Excellent video as always Chris! Been doing this exact thing for 20+ years and could not have said it better! Thank you so much for the hard work you put in helping others with explaining computers!!

My mantra is "Your PC is ONLY as fast the slowest component!"!!!😂😆🤣 That being said, the components ripe for upgrade are of course the RAM & SSD. Additionally CPU based on the socket can almost always be upgraded as most basic users only install the most reasonably priced CPU to meet their budget. Another upgrade that I usually do is putting a dedicated video card in the PCI-E x16 slot as doing so will offload the video processing from the motherboard to the video card...AND if you use any software (DVDFAB) for video transcoding it will offload processing to the video card, in my case an Nvidia card utilizing CUDA processors for easily transcoding the video without bogging the main computer CPU down!!!😁👍🏻

Watching this on a similar Desktop PC. I've already upgraded the memory so looking forward to the rest of the series.

Few weeks ago I upgrade my pc which has slightly lower spec than this Cpu - intel E4500 Ram - 2gb windows 10 pro I replace hard disk only with an SSD now it runs similar to 8GB pc as in video and copying & moving speed is impresive waiting for more upgrade This series is going to be interesting waiting for the next video :)

Love this video, great to see some old hardware again as it made me feel nostalgic and your instructions are truly excellent. Look forward to seeing an SSD in there and that boot time coming down significantly. As a minor piece of constructive feedback it may be worth mentioning the QVL as some of these older board can be picky about RAM......Asus springs to mind here particularly. Many thanks for the wonderful content as always Chris.

Most websites for the manufacturers of "corporate" PCs have a place on their support page where you can put in the full serial number to find out what is in your machine and exactly what it can be upgraded to. Sometimes upgrading can be a little tricky because of proprietary motherboards, power supplies, etc. And ALWAYS upgrade the BIOS first.

Upgraded many PC's in my lifetime and enjoy it. Still learned something new from this video and that's why I am here every Sunday. Thanks

I haven't even watched the video completely....But the title kindled the curiosity in me

lga775 that was hella nostalgic along with the core 2 duo i used to have and then the core i7. Now using AMD ryzen 7 on my laptop

I haven't seen all the video yet but that is the cleanest 10 year old PC I've ever seen! It looks brand new.

Great presentation style. Clear descriptions. I enjoyed building my own computer to get things going for the first time is an achievement. Thanks.

Wow, I literally sat down with a salvaged Dell Optiplex today and started to give it a once-over. It was a dog to begin with but I replaced the HDD with a SSD, and popped in an i5 3470s in place of the i3 2120. Now it's been resurrected. I've ordered an extra stick of RAM second hand from CEX for £6. Hopefully it's actually a stick of RAM and now a piece of burger cheese. All in all it's going to be a complete makeover for less than £40. A nice little project for the lockdown!

Thanks for following through with this series. Always interested in tinkering options. I hope you discuss graphics cards and worth upgrading in the current tight market. Also, whether to upgrade or buy a new system.

Thanks for a straight forward explanation. I've made a similar update before but some of it was guesswork not knowing why I was doing it. Good to see where you get the necessary information about the PC. Looking forward to the next video.

You are the salt of the earth, so kind, clear, and thorough, really saved my bacon ! 💜

Great video Chris. Upgrading an older pc for daily tasks and web browsing is easy and stops more e-waste from being created. You can still play some great older games with a modest gpu and I'm sure the ssd will make it even snappier, especially the boot time 😁

You always give the best explanation I can find on RU-vid thank you for always bringing us great videos

Learned a lot from you Chris . Now I am planning to upgrade my old PC which is 12yrs old.

I’ve been tinkering with an Optiplex 7010 I got second hand. Your videos are clear and easy to follow. Thanks.

Excellent hardware. I’m upgrading an old computer. So far I’ve maxed out the memory and installed an SSD. Running Ubuntu. Thanks

Old "corporate" PCs can be great budget options with a little upgrading and you can get them dirt cheap and occasionally even for free.

Very enjoyable video to watch, thank you Chris. Really looking forward to the rest of the series!

I got Asus EEE 1001PX with a 1C/2T Intel Atom for free from school, since it was about to be trashed. Upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2GB, which is maximum supported, installed an SSD, installed Windows 10 Tiny X64, turned off useless services and I am happy with it. It's a good machine for taking notes and doing light stuff. For a free PC it was a good deal. Greetings from Czechia!

Sometimes the older machines are so inefficient with power that it actually makes more sense to retire them. Maybe less of an issue with more recent machines. But I remember the case of someone wanting to run his Power Mac G5 as a spare machine for some server purposes, but that machine was so massively power hungry that it was cheaper to buy a Mac Mini (which also was faster).

Bravo!!! I’m going to recommend this video series to everyone I know who thinks it’s a waste to update old systems for daily use (read: not playing the latest games at the max settings) and wants something that just plain old works.

This comes at the right time, as more people do home office. I answered so many questions of people I know lately, that such a clean video surely helps. Especially with how hard it is to get new hardware at the moment. And without a easy to understand solution, it's hard to talk people out of buying a gtx 3090, to make their spreadsheets work faster on a old box, because "that is what my son told me makes a computer fast".

I have been given free Dell PC computers, which l rescue, because I hate to see them go to the city dump. I know they're useful life can be extended and I prefer a PC versus a laptop. I love the better keyboards which I typically get from Logitech and I prefer the mice from Logitech too . I prefer to have my monitor on a floating arm connected to my table with plenty of workspace. I have an old Lenovo PC that I am now retiring after 15 to 17 years which moves slower than a garden snail. I've replaced it with an Intel i7 chip on a Dell Optiplex 7040 with Windows 10 Pro. After watching several of your episodes with professional content and quality, I have used that information to rescue 2 older Dell machines and installed MX 19 Linux. My goal is to learn Linux and ultimately become comfortable enough with it to walk away from Windows. Your presentations have given me the courage to explore and rescue machines that should never be put to pasture. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with the rest of us as education is a very powerful tool.

Great video. I enjoyed the video very much. I often inherit computers from friends and family. The only thing I do differently during the planning stage is I try a get the motherboard's manual. Sometimes there is useful information in the manuals.

Ah yes, another soothing video! You just made my day, Chris

You do an excellent job showing and explaining everything. I will keep watching, thankyou.

For a used ebay computer, it was meticulously clean inside. The motherboard looked brand new in your video! What a great purchase!

Really great to have a tech tuber that isn't trying to sell me a VPN. Keep up the good work.

Keeping it out of the trash is the best part, not to mention learning how it works.

As usual a well written and presented article that was very informative. A fantastic job and I eagerly await next weeks episode.

Great series idea! Really appreciate this both for work and my secondary setup!

hey Christopher,this brings back "memories" no pun intended lol,to get a more responsive system i also uncheck animations,then your window panes will open instantly boot time may be increased if you change some settings in the advanced options (system settings), like use all cores at bootup,etc

Good morning, Mr Barnatt

Great content, brought back lots of memories of tinkering with computers! Looking forward to the hard drive upgrade.

Since a couple of days I’m cleaning and restoring my old “game pc” from 2008. An AMD Athlon 64 X2 system that still runs great on Debian. I decided to make a NAS and media server of it. So this guide comes at the right time👍🏻

Upgrading Ram helps. I think SSD will further improve the boot time.

Watching on PC that use DDR2 and Yorkfield LGA 775. Also your channel is as always gold.

These are the best explained videos on RU-vid! Thank you for your time and effort ! Your content is a huge help!

When putting an old computer back in operation, good idea to write the bios settings down and replace the CMOS battery.

Second hand-dual core PCs seem to have actually substantially risen in price over recent years. I have a couple of dual core HP ex-corporate desktops with 4GB RAM which I bought for about £25-£30 each delivered, which was the going price at the time on eBay.

What a wonderful day to hear this video and working on my ps1

All the right steps to upgrade a PC. Thanks Chris

Wasn’t there a scam on ebay, etc. where a guy was selling laptops with spyware pre-installed on? Might be a good idea for a future video showing people how to buy safely.

One option not included is if you replace the motherboard, you can install Ubuntu versus Windows and avoid an expensive upgrade and actually be a bit ahead of the curve for future uses.

Another good one, Chris. Not a surprise that the PC had only one DIMM. Supply for RAM at that time was lagging demand so RAM was at a premium. As you pointed out in your video, insufficient RAM means the computer will use the pagefile to swap to disk for lack of memory. When people bought PCs at that time, it was all about the GHz of the CPU and other specs. So for an OEM to be price competitive and still be able to compare on specs, the RAM was a typical compromise. Windows 7 didn't require quite as much RAM as WIndows 10 does, but the PCs were still underpowered. Adding the RAM is a very good first step on an upgrade for a PC of that vintage in most cases. We bought my daughter a MacBook Pro 2009 for graduation that year and a few years ago she told me it was probably end of life. I told her for Christmas that year I would upgrade the RAM and replace the HDD with a SSD. A totally new MacBook was born, and now 11 years later she is still using it and happy with it for most applications. Of course, some people think that more RAM is always the answer to higher performance. It all depends on how much RAM is being used by OS and applications running. As long as the system isn't swapping to disk, the PC is fine on RAM most likely. A show of the Task Manager might be useful to demonstrate and visually see RAM in use as more applications are running. An added bonus is if the motherboard/chipset support dual channel, you greatly increase performance by having 2 modules instead of one. But not all boards/chipsets support dual channel, so it's something to investigate to know for sure.

Great stuff! I have been wondering about upgrading or just buying new. I look forward to how the series unfolds.

Watched even tho I knew all this because you’re such a pleasant human being.

More memory RAM + SSD hard drive + Linux = huge improvement and new life for old computers.

We did this to an old i3 toshiba laptop - bonged in some ram and an SSD - however love watching your videos - I always learn something - great stuff

Great start to a series! I have a couple older business- or workstation-class machines of this era, which have served well. We did get a new gaming laptop around Black Friday, but it's still nice to keep the desktops relevant. An SSD (crucial MX500) really made a huge difference. I did notice an unused front panel usb header on your motherboard which could be handy for things like a Bluetooth adapter mounted internally.

Great video Sir. I would want to see you upgrade the CPU to a C2Q model just for the benefit of 4 cores.

Come on computer! You can do it! 🤣🤣🤣 Lots of encouragement 😂

Very informative and greatly enjoyed. I look forward to the rest of the series.

For older friends and family during the pandemic, I have recycled 7 different PCs I got from clearance houses and outlets. Most times these are Dell or HP machines that have come off lease but I did get a couple that were 8-9 years old. My standard for browser and Zoom usage is 4GB RAM and 500GB HDD. USB2 is okay for most of them, but I did occasionally install a USB3 card. I've been able to keep the budget low: $125 for the PC, $75 for 21" monitor and $50 for cheap webcam and speakers. I was torn about getting Chromebooks instead of PCs, but it turned out the PCs were way more versatile in the long run.

Running (simultaneous) programs faster is what really speeds up when you increase RAM size. Doing simultaneous test, such as loading a dozen tabs with different media-rich websites would show even greater performance gains from this upgrade.