Repair or replace?

[Polar Bear]

The not FiL has an ageing pc.  It is an HP with 4gb ram, 150gb of a ticking time bomb spinning rust hdd, an i3 processor and a dead cmos battery.

Now, I can put 16gb of ddr3l 1600 ram (max it can take) in, replace the rust with a 250gb ssd and put a new CR2032 button cell in but is it worth doing?

It runs Window 10 albeit at snails pace but I'm thinking 4gb ram might be a contributory factor there.

I have found a nos 2x8gb Crucial ram kit for it from the bay of thieves which may or may not work for £21 and I have a 250gb Samsung 850 SSD gathering dust.  And somewhere in the bottom of a drawer is a pack of CR2032 button cells ...

Should I just do it?

[Kim]

I have found a nos 2x8gb Crucial ram kit for it from the bay of thieves which may or may not work for £21 and I have a 250gb Samsung 850 SSD gathering dust.  And somewhere in the bottom of a drawer is a pack of CR2032 button cells ...

Should I just do it?

At that price, yes.  If it gets a year or two more useful life out of it, it seems worth doing on e-waste grounds.

[Polar Bear]

I was mildly surprised to see sodium ram sticks in there.  The main board is a tiny thing in one corner of an oversized box.  I'm not even sure that it's a standard but I am a bit out of date.

In extending it's life I am conscious of the PSU which looks entirely non-standard but seems to working just fine.  It doesn't look like I could open it up easily to de-dust it but I'm minded not to touch it as it works and isn't running hot.

I forgot to mention the clattery fan on the CPU cooler.  Luckily that seems to be a standard item with a standard plug connector to the main board.

[aidan.f]

Supposing FiL just needs email web-browser and WP? I'm happy to send you a clean working itx pc 2x4gb ddr3 for postage. or maybe just the RAM?  It last had Mint* on it, worked just fine can you convert FiL to Linux? Was built with win7. Processor won't run W10.
Failing that how about a business refurb - I recently brought  a HP G800 with Win 11 from rapid IT to replace the above.

[Lightning Phil]

I have 2 x 8GB, 1600MHz, DDR3-1600 DIMM sitting in their original packaging.  It’s Kingston memory and equivalent of Dell A5764358. Seem to remember buying for a laptop I had, but it wanted a different number of pins for its memory. Again, available for cost of postage, as it’s not serving much use here

[Polar Bear]

aidan.f:  I regret but not FiL is at that stage where teaching him how to use new things is not easy.  I spent about an hour a day over a week when we were forced to upgrade his mobile.  I set it up as near to his older one as humanly possible but just things like the buttons on the side being in different positions confused him greatly. 

If I can manage it repairing his existing machine would be by far the best option as ostensibly nothing will change from his perspective.

Lightning Phil:  I'll check and PM you either way.  Many thanks for the generous offer.

[Ham]

I've just been through the same exercise with an HP Pavilion Laptop, I proved that 4Gb combined with HD was a significant factor (with stuff swapping out to disk exacerbating the issue). I went for the full spec Crucial SODIMM for £32 Amazon, as the possible saving to second hand seemed dubious value. I also bought a 240Gb M2 SSD

From the "what a feckin' div" bucket, does anyone want to make me an offer for a 240Gb NVMe SSD (£15?) as I needed to buy a SATA one.

Also if a 4Gb SODIMM might help, that's available for free.

[aidan.f]

aidan.f:  I regret but not FiL is at that stage where teaching him how to use new things is not easy.

BTDT! - My father was part of his local circular ecomony  -  a Win9x PC which he saw no reason to upgrade, regulary got infected and went around the local PC repair shop.. - I switched him to 'nix, I do remember a commment that links in emails stopped working..

[Kim]

aidan.f:  I regret but not FiL is at that stage where teaching him how to use new things is not easy.  I spent about an hour a day over a week when we were forced to upgrade his mobile.  I set it up as near to his older one as humanly possible but just things like the buttons on the side being in different positions confused him greatly. 

To be fair, I regularly get confused by the buttons on the side of my phone, because some idiot put a hard-coded google assistant button where the power switch should be.  Cue me telling it to fuck off when I try to lock the phone on a regular basis.

[Polar Bear]

Ram ordered.  250gb ssd dug out of the TPOC.  CR2032 cell fished out of hiding place.  Must take a look at the cooling fan and measure it for replacements.  Also look at the connector because a few are non-standard which I might expect from an HP for instance.

[Ham]

Upgrade completed on mine, it now flies. OS install used to take about 1 hour - now 5 minutes. Startup sub 1 minute, from about 5

[Polar Bear]

Update:

So I finally found some time to start the work.  I whipped the lid off the Asus (not HP) box and replaced the CMOS battery and the upgrading him from 4gb to 16gb, the maximum this board can take.  I was able to reset the bios to boot from the correct device and save this at last!

Boot up time for this Win 10 machine has gone from more than 5 minutes to 18 seconds.  Astounding!

I have noted though that there is a noisy fan in there.  Being almost completely deaf he has not noticed this.  When I get around to cloning and replacing the spinning rust I shall replace the fan too