When I am out on service calls I am often asked by my customers if they should purchase a new PC and get rid of their existing one? There is no simple answer to this question but there are several factors that one should take into consideration before deciding to throw out the old PC and purchase a  new one. This article address desktop PC’s only. Laptops are a whole different matter and needs to be discussed in a seperate article.

1.) Does age really matter? (Summary: For a lot of people, no.)

Microsoft suggest that you trade in your PC every 4 years to stay current on technology. I personally believe that this is bad advice for the vast majority of my home users that I service. (For businesses, there is a valid argument for doing this but for this article I am sticking with homeowners.) Most of them use their PC for three primary reasons. One is to surf the web and the others are to send and recieve emails and write simple word documents. If your PC is 4, 5 or even 6 years old and you don’t find yourself complaining about speed or other issues, why replace it? Today’s PC’s pack so much power and very few of us will actually come close to utilizing the potential speed and memory utilization that is possible. There are obvious exceptions to this such as people who use their PC to play 3d animated games or for those who use some type of CAD program that requires as much horse power as possible. However if you are happy with what you have, then why buy a new one? One reminder that I would like to point out is that if your PC contains important data you should be backing it up regularly regardless of how old your PC is. Hard drives are one of the most common components to die in a PC. Protect your data!

2.) How much money should I spend repairing an old PC? (Summary: No more than 50% of the price of a new PC)

If your desktop PC is 3 years or older and it breaks, how much money should you be willing to spend in order to get it fixed? I personally tell my customers that they need to think twice about paying a repair bill that is equal to 50% or more a new PC. Notice I didn’t say 50% or more of the current value of their PC. For desktops that are 3 years old, there is rarely any resale value left. I’ll use a common situation that I come across with my customers. They call me complaing that their PC is giving them strange errors, random lockups and issues with saving files. Once I’m on site I discover that their hard drive is recording errors indicating that it is on it’s last leg. In addition, I can also hear the power supply fan clicking loudly which is not a good thing! I tell the customer that the parts needed to fix these issues will run between $90-$120 and that my fee will be $210 (3 hours of labor) to replace the parts and install Windows on the new harddrive and restore their data files from the old one. Using these figures the customer is faced with a potential bill of $330. What is important to note here is that the old PC is still an OLD PC even though it has two new parts. This leads to the question of do I want to sink this kind of money into a 3 year old PC and take my chances that nothing else will break? That’s an individual choice that each of us has to make, but, provided you can afford it, my best advice would be to purchase a new PC. The customer in this scenario wouldn’t have to pay much more to get a brand new desktop that would run circles around their old one. Most importantly, they now have a PC with a new life span.

3.) How much money should I spend upgrading a new PC? (Summary: Invest in memory and larger harddrives when needed.)

This is one area where in some cases it pays to invest a little money in your PC. By far and away the two most common upgrades that my customers need are memory for performance issues and larger harddrives because their running out of space. Memory and hard drives have become so cheap that you can easily upgrade both for a price in the $100 range. If your PC has never given you any problems and it is at least has a processor of 2ghz then it’s worth the investment to upgrade these two items. Rarely do I find that my customers need a stronger processor for what they are doing.

There will be times when you should not spend money on an upgrade. Suppose your old PC doesn’t have a DVD/RW drive and you now need one. You also need additional memory, a large harddrive and network card to bring the PC up to your needs. When multiple upgrades are needed it normally is a good indication that it’s time to buy new and retire your old PC.

4.) Planning ahead for future software such as Vista (Summary: Plan on a new PC)

If you know you are going to want to upgrade to Vista at some point in the future be prepared to buy a new PC. While it is possible to upgrade your 3 years old PC to meet the specs that Vista requires, it just isn’t cost effective. Vista is known to be a resource hog and you need to start of with a modern processor that can handle the load.

The bottom line is that there are times when spending money on repairing or upgrading your old PC makes sense. Just make sure that you think it through and do your research first. Ultimately, there is no wrong answer if you make a decision that feels right for you.