The Perils Of Pc Upgrades

Illawarra Mercury

Monday June 19, 2000

with CAMERON BIGGART

Out with the old and in with the new: Chip Chat's old Pentium II 400MHz CPU has been successfully replaced with a Pentium III 750MHz and the old 128 megabytes of memory has been augmented up to 256Mb.

The old 6 gigabytes hard disk has a new 20.5Gb friend and the old 4Mb Trident video card has been replaced with a 32Mb GeForce 256 3-D card.

Surprisingly, even though the entire system has almost doubled in capacity there is only a marginal increase in the noticeable speed at which the system runs.

This can be put down to the system running at the speed of the slowest link in the chain, and is the reason that if you have a 9600 baud modem then it's pointless to have a $6000 you-beaut speedy PC if all you want to do is surf the Net.

You need to consider the use your machine will get before going out and spending the money - once again knowledge is the key.

Even though you don't really notice a huge speed difference in day-to-day use of the new PC, it's the things that are going on in the background that can give a huge speed increase, particularly when it comes to applications that really push your hardware to the limit - such as today's games.

The entire upgrade went like a dream, including the replacement of the motherboard to allow the use of the new, faster, CPU.

One thing that you need to be very careful about if you are playing around inside your computer's guts, apart from having a full and current back-up of all your data, is static electricity.

Static can kill your computer faster than the blink of an eye and it can do it without you even feeling a thing.

Everybody at one stage or another has probably rubbed their feet on the carpet and sent a static zap into the earlobe of an unsuspecting friend, or is that just me?

The zap you create by doing that is in the order of tens of thousands of volts of electricity and, in fact, you need to generate at least 1300 volts to even feel a slight tingle when you earth yourself, which is what is happening when the spark jumps from you to your friend.

What you may not realise is that voltages as low as 30 volts can kill or seriously maim an integrated circuit in your computer. You wouldn't even feel it happening and you could end up damaging your computer so that it had an intermittent fault that was nearly impossible to track down.

The best way to minimise the risk of static damage in your PC is to use a ``static strap" whenever you wander inside the box.

A static strap is a lead with a bulldog clip on one end coupled to a resistor and a wrist strap. The bulldog clip attaches to the chassis of your PC and the resistor slows down the static discharge so that you don't feel the zap.

You need to keep your computer chassis earthed for a static strap to work properly, and you can do that by leaving the power cord plugged in but switched off at the wall point.

You also should be careful of any synthetic materials you may be wearing, such as a nylon neck tie, which aren't earthed by the static strap and can carry a hefty charge of their own.