Seil Chat

Hope you can help - a number of people have told me that all computers have a limited life, and that my free Scottish Exec. PC will die soon as most of the others already have!??

Is this true?
If I was to renew, should I go for PC or Laptop?
What's the benefits?
Will my printer be compatible?

Thanks in advance

Hi Sally,

The ScotExec PCs can be kept going and upgraded but it depends on what you want to do with them. As originally supplied they only had just enough memory to run Windows XP, which made them horribly slow. Quite a few people have stuck another 128K of RAM in them and improved the performance, but they are still going to be very slow if you have a snazzy 7MegaPixel digital camera or like watching videos on UTube.

A few ScotExec PCs have 'died' due to the software becoming corrupted and have been restored using the Restore disk set you got with the PC, but in general this has been a difficult process. On two of them I had to reformat the hard drive manually before I could reinstall Windows, which needs a boot disk and is a bit technical.

Other sources of death can be the processor chip overheating because the cooling fan has stopped going round. If you notice this in time a new fan is cheap and easy to fit. CD drives also have a limited life, but again a new one of these is easy to fit.

If you suspect your PC is dying it is time to BACK UP all your important documents - the ideal way to do this is onto a USB flash drive, a little memory stick you put in the USB port of the machine. (Very cheap, get a 1GB or 2GB one - I expect Tescos have them now, if not go to any computer shop). It shows up in My Computer as another disk drive and you can drag and drop files onto it.This is easy for documents, pictures etc but if you want to back up your email you need to do it from within Outlook Express (and it doesn't always work)

Done that? OK, now ask yourself, do I know someone who will fix this horrible outdated old machine for me for nothing? If not, bin it - it is not worth paying anyone to repair it.

If you can afford it there has never been a better time to buy a new PC. Aldi had new PCs for £399 recently with huge memory, storage and processing power and lots of fancy widgets such as a card to allow you to watch TV, a DVD recorder etc etc

Your printer will work - but it might also be a good time to get another one of these, especially if you want to print photos, as performance has risen incredibly and prices have plummeted.

As for laptops - you will pay more money for less performance and capability, but modern laptops are very reliable and convenient if you look after them - the one I am typing this on has run my business for four years and spent the last year on a small boat cruising the East Atlantic! It wsa not the cheapest though.

Hope this helps you - any more questions please post them here.

- Nick

Magnificent respose - initially a bit too technical for me, but overall very informative.........

Thanks. I shall go away and consider my options.