Parts Upgrade - Advice Please

Hi all

I bought a PC from this site a few years back and it is starting to show wear and tear, namely the speed.

Not being a very Techy person and relied on the advice given on this forum when I made my purchase, what are my options for giving the PC an MOT/ making easy part changes to improve processing speed etc. This is mainly a gaming PC and has home general use.

Many thanks for your assistance.

This is the spec when bought:

Case
PCS DOMINATOR 6806B BLACK CASE

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-4590 (3.3GHz) 6MB Cache

Motherboard
ASUS® H81M-PLUS: Micro-ATX, LG1150, USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs

Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)

Graphics Card
2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 960 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready

1st Storage Drive
1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1003FZEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

Power Supply
CORSAIR 450W VS SERIES™ VS-450 POWER SUPPLY

Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)

Processor Cooling
Super Quiet 22dBA Triple Copper Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler

Thermal Paste
STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING

Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)

Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)

USB/Thunderbolt Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS

Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence

Windows 10 Upgrade
FREE Upgrade to Windows 10 with all Windows 7 & Windows 8.1 Purchases

Windows Recovery Media
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) DVD with paper sleeve

Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE

Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE

Browser
Firefox™

Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)

I’m still on that caliber / age of core components and there’s a few things you can do to astronomically improve the performance for not much cash.

1. And probably the biggest improvement will be an SSD. Install that as your OS drive and keep the HDD for data. That in itself would transform the PC. You’d want a standard 2.5” SATA SSD like the Samsung 850 Evo and I’d recommend a minimum of 250GB to include some games.

2. Since adding a new os drive, do a full clean install of windows. A lot of slowdowns can be because of a bloated os, and reinstall will make it fly again.

3. I’d start with that and if you’re still itching for more gaming performance, then consider an extra 8gb RAM.

If you're itching for more gaming performance, upgrade the graphics card, then consider more RAM.

I agree with the above - I had a very similar spec, this is my experience of upgrading it:

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?61108-New-AMD-gaming-build

SpyderTracks said:

I’m still on that caliber / age of core components and there’s a few things you can do to astronomically improve the performance for not much cash.

1. And probably the biggest improvement will be an SSD. Install that as your OS drive and keep the HDD for data. That in itself would transform the PC. You’d want a standard 2.5” SATA SSD like the Samsung 850 Evo and I’d recommend a minimum of 250GB to include some games.

2. Since adding a new os drive, do a full clean install of windows. A lot of slowdowns can be because of a bloated os, and reinstall will make it fly again.

3. I’d start with that and if you’re still itching for more gaming performance, then consider an extra 8gb RAM.

Click to expand...

I'd agree with all of this, especially the SSD advice. However, if you're looking to upgrade just because your PC has become sluggish you might be able to improve performance without spending any money at all...

I thought that would get your interest.

The biggest cause of slowdowns in older PCs is poor HDD management. Even when running at peak performance the HDD is the slowest component of your PC by several orders of magnitude. Anything that causes the HDD to work at less than peak performance is gong to be very noticeable, and the bigger the disk the bigger the performance slowdown.

There is one thing you can do now that will return your HDD to its original peak performance; do a clean reinstall of Windows. This will clean out all the garbage, all the bits of old software left behind after you uninstalled them, and clear out the bloatware you no longer use. Plus, and this is the important bit, it will reinstall Windows components in adjacent tracks on your HDD - this is the key factor in achieving peak HDD performance. The difference will be huge.

If you don't fancy a reinstall - and I do suggest you seriously consider that - there are some things you can do that will return your HDD to somewhere close to peak performance...

1. Clean out all the garbage; temp files, junk files, cache files, etc. The Windows disk cleanup tool can do this quite well but other tools (like Ccleaner) can be more thorough. Over time a huge volue of junk builds up on an HDD and this does slow things down.

2. If your 1TB HDD is more than about 60% full archive all the user data you need to keep but which you almost never use onto an external HDD. Data you really don't need any more should be deleted. Also uninstall all software you no longer use. What this does is reduce the volume of data on the HDD and that means the read/write heads won't have to travel so far looking for data, that time is one of the big contributors to poor HDD performance. Aim to reduce the volume of data to 50% or less.

3. Defragment the files on your HDD. This brings all the fragments of files that are scattered all over the HDD by the normal action of the Windows file system into single contiguous extents. Doing this reduces the number of times the read/write heads have to move over the disk to locate the required data, that time is one of the big contributors to poor HDD performance. The Windows defragmenter can do this quite well but other tools (there are many) can do a better job.

The above will eliminate about 85% of the HDD performance problems, the remaining 15% can only be eliminated by bringing all your files and folders into adjacent tracks on the disk, some defragmenters let you do this (the built-in Windows defragger doesn't).

The reason an SSD makes such a big difference to Windows and programs is that it doesn't have the problem of moving read/write heads and so all the lost time in this area is eliminated. If you can afford one an SSD will make a much bigger difference than all the management I've suggested above. You get what you pay for with SSDs however, so don't be tempted to buy the cheapest you can find.

Thank you all for your advice

The clean install seems to be more favourable so I will work out how to do that!