Upgrading – Rebuilding Computers

Posted on: August 26th, 2009

Recently, I’ve had a lot of success with doing upgrades on old computers.

It turns out that it has several advantages over getting a new computer:

It’s cheaper because not everything needs to be replaced when upgrading a computer. The usual parts that should be replaced are: motherboard, CPU, RAM and Hard Drive.
You won’t have to deal with Vista, or reinstalling all your applications, or even transferring your data. After the upgrade everything will be the same just a lot faster.

The cost usually comes out to be between $300 and $350.

When can an upgrade be done?

First of all, we can do this only with Windows XP machines. Vista contains safeguards that make switching hardware very complicated, if not impossible. Also the machine should not be set up to be part of a company domain, but as a standalone machine.

Also the machine needs to be a desktop. Laptops don’t have very many standardized replaceable parts so we can’t do the necessary upgrades. For these usually memory (RAM) increase is pretty much the only upgrade that can be done.

So if you have an older Windows XP desktop machine, with no special company setups then you can get your computer upgraded to a faster machine, without losing any of your data, settings or software.

How is it done?

An upgrade is an in-shop service.

If you need it done quickly, then we can get the parts in local stores (a bit more expensive). Or, usually, we order the parts online and when they are here we give you a call, you bring in the computer and in a day, or two you have a nice, fast machine back.