Stretch your money by stretching your PC's life span

You can get a decent desktop computer for $800 these days. But who's got $800? A lot fewer of us than just a few months ago. Given our current economic travails, I plan to write a little less about the latest and greatest gadgets, and a little more about how to get more value from the stuff you already own.

Your personal computer, for instance. If it's a few years old, and acting its age, you could lay out $800 or so for a decent-quality replacement, or spend a lot less to extend the life of your current machine. If you've recently begun editing home videos or playing high-end games, you probably need far more power than a simple upgrade will provide. But even those who do little more than Web surfing and e-mail often find their machines slowing down with age. For such users, a timely upgrade or two may be all that's needed.

Everybody knows adding memory can boost a computer's performance. And even a newbie can figure out how to snap memory modules onto a computer's motherboard. But which modules? Memory comes in many versions, and you must pick the right one for your machine. Apple Inc.'s Macintosh computers have a nice feature that tells you exactly what kind to buy, but machines that run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating systems aren't as helpful.

If your computer came from a big-name company like Dell Inc. or Hewlett-Packard Co., you can look up its memory requirements at the manufacturer's website. But Crucial.com, a leading memory chip vendor, has a bit of free software that will identify the type of memory in pretty much any PC. Run the Crucial System Scanner, and in seconds you'll know what kind of memory you have, and how much of it. If it's less than a couple of gigabytes, it makes sense to add more. A gigabyte's worth sells for $30 to $40.

Even with extra memory, Windows computers are notorious for becoming slower and buggier over time. Simply wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything from scratch often leads to a dramatic improvement in performance. It's a time-consuming but cheap way to speed up an older computer.

But you'll need your original copies of Windows and all the other software you rely upon. When you bought your machine, these programs may have been included on CDs. In many cases, they're stored on a portion of the hard drive, and you're given the option to burn your own CD copies. Still other companies will send you the software disks if you ask. In any case, don't think of wiping out your hard drive unless you've got the restore disks.

You'll also need to back up all your vital files - tax records, baby pictures, and the like. I pay $50 a year for Carbonite, an Internet-based backup service, but reinstalling files this way can take several days. The fastest solution is an external hard drive that pops into a USB port and can back up your files in a matter of hours. A 500-gigabyte external drive can be found for around $125 - more than you want to spend, perhaps. But if you can't afford to back up your computer files, you can't afford a computer.

As long as you're buying hard drives, consider replacing the internal drive as well. Even if your present drive has plenty of unused capacity, hard drives are fragile beasts that often go bad after two or three years. A newer drive will often read and write data faster, thus improving your machine's performance. Besides, today's drives are a bargain. You can find 500-gigabyte internal drives for about $150.

Alas, while swapping drives is far from difficult, it requires some technical knowledge. For instance, does your computer use Parallel ATA or Serial ATA drives? If you don't know what these terms mean, leave internal drive upgrades to an expert. Retailers like Best Buy or Circuit City will charge $40 to $50 to install a drive, but a hefty $100 to transfer a mere 10 gigabytes of data. So even if you have a technician install the drive, reload the software and files yourself.

Instead of upgrading your computer, consider investing in a new monitor. You're probably still using one with an old-fashioned square-ish shape, which limits your ability to work with more than one program at a time. But for $250 or so, you can get a flat-panel monitor with a wide screen - a smaller version of the flat-screen TV monitors found in so many living rooms.

The wide format is ideal for viewing DVDs or movie downloads. You can even turn a PC into a high-definition television set by spending another $75 or so for a TV tuner card. But the wide screen is just as valuable when it's time to work. Even an older machine can run lots of programs at once - like spreadsheets, word processors, browsers. With extra screen real estate, you can easily keep two or three programs constantly in view. Suddenly you're more productive, even if your computer's no more powerful than before.

If you try everything I've suggested, you'll be getting near the price of a new computer. That's too much to spend on tweaking an obsolete PC. But one or two upgrades might carry an old machine for another year or two - time enough, perhaps, to figure out where your next $800 will come from.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.