Breath Life into an Old Machine

Got an old PC/Mac not being used? Is it slow and you don't want to use it because of it's speed? Well here is a way to fix that. I recently decided to breath life into my old iMac G5. It already had the max amount of RAM, but the hard drive was five years old. The HDD works fine, it is just very slow. So I decided it was time to upgrade. I bought a 60 GB SSD from OCZ through Newegg's Shell Shocker deal, it was a really good price. Remember to keep an eye on those deals! Now, since my iMac was so old, I needed to buy something called "IcyDock 2.5-3.5 SSD Converter". This is a small black box that will house the SSD, and it will also fit where the HDD would go. I needed this because I couldn't put a mounting bracket in my iMac. Before doing anything, I backed up all my information from my HDD to an external drive. This way, incase anything went wrong, I had all my files backed up. After receiving my SSD, I took out my old hard drive, and put my new SSD in with the IcyDock encasing around it. Then, I booted up the machine and inserted the installation disk that came with my computer. Before I did anything within the installation program, I went to "Utilities" and then opened up "Disk Utility". I then proceeded to format my new SSD so that OS X could be installed. I closed Disk Utility and then ran the installer. It only took about 15-20 minutes to install everything! My iMac is now much faster. Next I have to upgrade the OS to Leopard (it came with Tiger), but that is for another post. If you have a PC, you can do the same thing. However, PCs are more versatile and allow you to do much more then just the HDD replacement/upgrade. You can also upgrade your CPU/Processor, RAM, Graphics Card, and any other peripherals. So before you decide to throw out that old computer, consider upgrade some parts and make it last even longer!

~Dave