Is my PC too old to be revived?

Blakos

New member
Hey all,

Back in 2013 I built my gaming PC, and did this on a budget.

At the time it worked great and could run Skyrim on very high graphics easily with no lag

As a few years have now passed, its got slower and slower, until it now takes about 20 mins (no joke) from first pressing the power button, to being fully usable

My question is, looking at my below specs, can upgrading 1 or 2 elements make my PC fast and usable again, or has it gone too far and i'd be better off starting a new rig?

I don't use it all that often so want to keep it on a budget still as much as possible

Thanks for all your help.

My specs are as follows:

Komputerbay 8GB RAM ( 2 x 4gb DDr3 DIMM)
Seagate Barracuda 500gb HDD
VTX3D AMD Radeon HD 7750 graphics Card
AMD HDZ965FBGMBOX Phenom ii X4 965 3.4ghz AM3 Black edition CPU
Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 AMD 760G )Socket AM3+ Micro-ATX Motherboard
corsair CX500

If I missed anything major off here, please let me know (didn't think keyboards, mice, screens etc really matter)
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Clean install of Windows.

Add an SSD (250gb SSD e.g. MX500).

Reinstalling Windows is free and if there is a hardware failure in your PC down the line you can at least transfer the SSD to a future system.
 

Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Exactly what Oussebon says.

Over time one of the biggest factors that cause slowdowns is the amount of crud we install either on purpose, or usually as add-ons to other software (games and their 'game centres' are a good example of this).

They often add themselves to various startup places so that they load at logon and over time can vastly slow the boot and logon process down as you are seeing.

Doing a backup of all your important data and then a clean install - i.e. one where you ideally format the disk is a very worthwhile exercise but, also as Oussebon suggests, if you're going to down that route you may as well also take the opportunity to pop an SSD in. Any SSD is an order of magnitude faster than an HDD anyway but combined with the fresh install of Windows, it will genuinely feel like a new machine all over again.

It won't improve things much in-game, of course, other than to speed up level loading, but your PC performance overall will genuinely be massively better all round.

Edit: You could also keep the HDD if you wanted, to store data on. If you do this, I would suggest that you remove it and only have the SSD in for installation as that way you are 100% guaranteed to be putting the OS on the correct drive.
 
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