December: Slowdown trend in PC upgrades continues

4 Comments

• 
  alex turovsky January 2, 2009 at 11:52 am

  That’s strange since 1GB of DDR II RAM costs as much as 20$ today.

  I think people are unaware of the possibility to upgrade their PC by spending almost no money and in the same time getting huge performance increase.

  I say: Raise an arm, get some RAM.

  Reply
• 
  Jon MacFarland January 31, 2009 at 6:10 am

  While this information is valuable, without other information to validate it, it is lacking. There are many computers with 512Mb of RAM however, as the person above said an upgrade on DDR II would be very inexpensive. However, if you look at systems with DDR II, almost no system is sold with less then 1Gb onboard. With that in mind, I would conclude that the people this represent are the people with DDR I, who because of the incoming resession are reluctant to purchase new computers and are lookign for cheap ways of keeping there existing system working.

  If there was a way to show the typical processor that this site finds that it runs, that would be an interesting coilation between the two groups.

  Reply
• 
  Alan Arfken March 25, 2009 at 3:27 am

  Ok, someone reluctant to purchase a new computer could signifcantly boost the power of the old DDR based unit by buying a DDR2 based motherboard, DDR2 RAM and a DDR2 CPU for less than $150 and subsize it with the sale on eBay of the DDR RAM.

  After all an upgrade of “old” 512MB to 1GB DDR RAM is often more expensive than DDR2 now, and that some CPU’s used to upgrade DDR boards are selling for more than more advanced ones for DDR2 boards.

  Specifically, I’ve noticed that replacing an AMD 939 socket based DDR single core AMD Athlon 64 CPU and heatsink like the 3700+ with an AMD 64 X2 dual core version for the 939 socket costs 2 to 4 times what the AM2 or AM2+ socket version of the X2 now goes for. Here’s where you find out you haven’t got what you thought you paid for.

  It seemed to me then that the best idea was to replace the DDR motherboard with a similar DDR2 motherboard, CPU, and quantity of RAM.

  Well, I can’t get it to run the C/D drive containing the boot and the “recovery” partition. The copy of XP that came with the manufactured computer just won’t work with the new parts installed. Worse, it seems that Microsoft closed a previous loophole by requiring that new purchases of OEM copies of XP could be sold only with the companion sale of a complete computer, not just a computer part — like the drive to run it on.

  Seems wasteful and unfair to me.

  Reply
• 
  Rudan Dimaandal April 1, 2009 at 6:18 pm

  Well, on my opinion upgrading your PCs even though it cost a bit expensive, is still not a waste of money because it gives you more benefits and saves you a lot of time.

  Reply