Extend Life of your Existing Hardware

Upgrade or buy afresh? That's not a very easy question to answer, unless of course your systems have completely died out on you and there's no possibility of reviving them.

Besides upgrading the RAM, there are several ways by which you can optimize your existing systems so that they remain alive and running smoothly, till the time you have budgets to buy fresh systems. Here sare a few ways (in no particular order) you can keep your systems running smoothly.

Clean up your systems

While there are lots of different tools available to help clear unnecessary data from a system, our favorite is CCleaner. This is a very snappy little tool to quickly optimize your system and clean up the unnecessary clutter. It scans through the entire system and identifies all the unnecessary files, such as temporary files in web browsers and the system, cookies, memory dumps, clipboard, etc. You can then select which files to delete and which ones to retain. You can be rest assured that it can free up a sizable amount of disk space in your system. Apart from that, it can also clean up traces of online activity like Internet history. There's even a registry cleaner, which identifies all unnecessary entries.

Block auto-run software

Software that starts running when you log on is a particular nuisance to Windows users. Too many auto-running programs can suck system resources and slow your machine. But it's hard to find the source(s) of this problem, and it's hard to decide which programs really need to auto-launch and which ones don't. A tool called Autorun 3.1 for Windows will scan all locations where autorun files tend to hide, and present a list so that you can decide what to block or allow.

Shuffle workloads

A system that's slow for a power user could be a boon for an ordinary user who needs it for basic productivity. A system that's slow for running basic productivity apps could be a boon for a data entry operator. The point is, systems slow for one function can be re-distributed for apps that will run well on them.

This way, you'll have to buy fewer new machines. In fact, outdated systems could even be used for fixed functions that would not require any tampering. For instance, we have converted older systems in our labs into a Linux based failover router for our Internet gateway. You can read more about it at http://ld2.in/14r. Likewise, you could also convert older systems into diskless thin clients. You can read more about it here: http://ld2.in/14s.

Use Add-on cards

Another important thing that can make a decent system outdated is the newer technological advancements out there in the market. By this we mean that your system might not be outdated but it would seem outdated to you because you are not able to make use of newer technologies like USB 3.0 etc. One expensive method to be able to use this tech is buying newer motherboards which come equipped with them onboard. The other, cheaper, however useful, method could be the use of add on PCI express cards. Add on cards can be plugged onto the existing systems which can extend the existing hardware to be able to use newer technologies like USB 3.0 etc.

Re-use components

Desktop systems are not a bundled entity and its components are usable as spares for other systems as well. Working parts from one faulty system can be and should be used to supplement/replace the faulty entities in other systems. Old IDE hard drives for instance, can't be used in SATA based motherboards. You can instead buy IDE-SATA converters and use these as external drives.

Conserve storage

If your systems are running out of disk space, then a key reason for it can be personal data (like family photos, MP3 songs, videos, software downloads, etc) of employees being stored on it. Whether to allow employees to store their personal data or not is up to you, but you can free up a lot of hard disk space simply by having the personal data removed.

The same goes for your servers as well, which are directly under the control of the IT department. Some applications also tend to create a lot of temp files in the system that just lies there. We've had cases with an anti-virus product, wherein if the virus scan was interrupted in the middle, it created a huge temp file that simply chewed up hard drive space.

Another one is the Thunderbird email client. If you don't compact folders, then over a period of time, they get really bloated. That's because even after you delete emails from a particular folder, Thunderbird doesn't really purge them. This happens after you compact the folder. We've had cases where we saved GBs of space on a single system after compacting the folders in the email client.

Use online storage

So if users are not allowed to store their personal data on the official systems, where else can they go? The solution is online storage. Google for instance, offers a 7.5 GB storage mailbox for every account. Once this storage is filled up, a person has the option of extending his storage by 20 GB for as low as $5 (240 Rs). This can be a great tool to free up your local storage and carry your really usefull data online as it would now be accessible all throughout without the use of a physical medium like a hard disk. Also, online storage like Dropbox can also be used at negligible prices. Accounts can be synced on multiple mediums like your office desktop/laptop and home desktop/laptop which results in saving of storage space over multiple systems. Using online apps like Google Docs also helps save space which would otherwise have been used to store documents and which do not provide the option of easy portability as compared to a Google Docs. Picassa can be a great tool to store and access photographs online.

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