Upgrading an Old Computer

In the process of upgrading a bunch of office computers, I decided to explore the effect of various upgrade options on improving a computer’s performance.  I compared the upgrade options separately and in combination.

• Adding memory
• Replacing the system hard drive with an SSD drive
• Replacing an SATA II (3 MB/sec interface with an SATA III (6 MB/sec interface)
• Replacing the motherboard to use DDR3 RAM instead of DDR2 RAM
• Replacing the CPU with a faster one.  (Dual core E8400 -> Quad core I5-3570)
• Adding a PCI express USB 3.0 adapter to a PCI express V.1 single slot.
• Resetting Windows 10 to make a “clean install”.
• Changing from Windows 10 32 bit to Windows 10 64 bit.

Considerations

In the past, when doing an upgrade on a home computer, I would generally do a clean re-install, add memory and replace the system hard drive with an SSD drive.  If the operating system were 32 bit, I would change it to 64 bit.   But, when considering upgrading from 10 to 20 computers at once, I wanted to be clearer on which upgrades would be the most cost-effective and which ones could possibly be skipped.  One consideration was minimizing cost.  The second factor was minimizing time, which indirectly results in a reduction in cost to the client.  Performing a clean (re)install of a computer requires installing all the software, printers, scanners, networking, etc. and configuring everything.  In an office environment, it is no small task.

For the worst of the machines, it was decided that they were just going to be replaced (not upgraded).  These were 3 Lenovo dual-core E8400 32 bit Windows 10 machines with 2GB memory.

Upgrade #1

The first of those 3 computers was replaced with an upgraded  Lenovo Core 2 Quad 9400 unit with 64bit Windows 10 and 4GB RAM that was inoperable due to a bad motherboard.   The motherboard was replaced “fixing” the computer.  Windows was “reset” to perform a clean install.  Although it was much improved following the reinstall, it still took a while to boot and it just didn’t have a “fast” feel.  I then replaced its hard drive with a 120GB SSD drive and then it booted very quickly (in seconds) and was noticeably much more responsive.

Upgrade #2

The remaining 2 E8400 computers described above were replaced with newly purchased refurbished HP-Compaq computers with Windows 10 64bit,  I5-3570 processors, 8GB RAM, and 240GB SSD drives.  These computers are really fast and worked out perfectly.  Getting refurbished computers you can get great deals that don’t cost much more than adding an SSD drive and extra memory and you can upgrade your CPU at the same time (ie. just pick a unit with a faster processor).  For example, the I-5 3570 processor is about 3 times faster than the E8400.  You can go the Passmark website to find the relative speeds of the various CPUs.

 

Upgrade #3

Out of curiosity, I ran some experiments on the E8400 computers.  Remember, these were the ones that it was decided they weren’t worth upgrading.  The following shows the steps taken and the results:

1. Clean install from a USB installation flash drive of 64 bit windows 10.
   1. Result: improved but still horrible.
2. Add additional 2GB memory (total now 4GB)
   1. Result: much less in the way of hard faults (use task manager->Performance->open resource monitor)
      1. Note: Hard faults occur when the computer runs out of physical memory and uses the hard drive to extend its memory.  With a traditional hard drive, it is very slow compared to physical memory and this greatly bottlenecks/slows down the computer
      2. The computer was still horribly slow despite the extra memory.
3. Replace the hard drive with an SSD Drive.
   1. Dramatic improvement
   2. Computer booted in a few seconds instead of minutes
   3. Very responsive, definitely usable
4. Remove 2GB memory (leaving only 2GB total)
   1. Result: Computer practically the same as above in #3.  No significant noticeable drop in performance despite having only 2GB memory.
   2. A dramatic increase in hard faults (hundreds per second), yet the SSD drive handled the hard faults without a noticeable drop in computer performance.

Upgrade #4

So, I decided to take this experiment another step forward.  This time I took one of the other Windows 10 32 bit E8400 computers.  It literally would take almost 10 minutes just to boot. It was beyond horrible.  I was “certain” it required a clean re-install.  Instead, I left it as was including only 2GB RAM and the ONLY thing I did was clone its hard drive to the SSD drive.  The result is below:

1. Boot time went from 8 minutes to 8 seconds.
2. Despite a high hard fault rate, the computer remained quick and responsive.
3. The performance monitor showed that 70 to 75% of the memory was constantly being used
4. I even ran Microsoft Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Chrome, surfed the web, played a blu ray video (all simultaneously), trying to overwhelm it and cause it to hesitate.  Other than some minor 1/10 sec pause hiccoughs, there was no slowing.
5. I would have never guessed that the SSD drive alone could do all that in that situation.

I also want to point out, that in all the examples above, these SATA III drives were plugged into SATA II ports.  So, none of the above performance improvement was attributable to an SATA III interface.

Adding a USB 3.0 Adapter

Around the same time I was doing the office computer upgrades, I purchased an 8TB USB 3.0 external hard drive for my main home theater PC.   That computer is an older computer and only has USB 2.0 ports.  In order to get the full USB 3.0 bandwidth all adapters I could find required a PCI express slot version 2.  The catch here is most of the computers that don’t already have at least one USB 3.0 slot also only have PCI express version 1.  However, even though you can’t get the full USB 3.0 speed plugging the adapter into a PCI express version one slot, you can get about 1/2 its speed, which is still 5X faster than a USB 2.0 port.  I got a USB 3.0 PCI express adapter and plugged it in.  At first, it didn’t work, because I failed to notice it required plugging into it a disk drive power connector for extra power.  Once supplied with extra power, it worked fine.  The USB drive transfer rates went up about 4X what they were on USB 2.0.  This is probably as fast as that (mechanical) drive can go anyway and is comparable in speed to an internal hard drive connected directly to an SATA port.

Conclusion:

The most effective (and cost-effective) upgrade was replacing the system hard drive with an SSD drive.  This was so effective, that in a worst-case scenario, this upgrade alone obviated the other upgrades.  This saves time and money.  This is not to say the other upgrades would not help, but the quantitative and real-world improvement in performance was mostly attributed to the SSD drive, even when done using an SATA II interface (which is what you normally find on an older computer).