I've been running remanufactured (ebay) Dell GX520 and 620 SFF at my
business for many years with great success. I just bought a used IBM / Lenovo
ThinkCentre M58 because is seems to hold faster processors. I know these units
have seen daily use in Schools and business environments so I was wondering if
it would be a good idea to replace some of the major parts of these computers
with NOS? Power supply would probably be the most important to change or at
least clean? Probably a new Hard Drive? Motherboard? Leave it alone or
replace it? Processor? Anything else I should maybe replace? Again, I would
replace with factory spec NEW parts but probably upgrade ram to 4GB and run
the fastest processor the MB could hold. My needs are simple. 160GB. 3.0 ishh
processor. 4GB Ram. I would 2 units. One on XP and one on Win7. More parts
available for the Dell but I have found some Lenovc parts. Good or bad idea?
Refreshing older computers?
I've been running remanufactured (ebay) Dell GX520 and 620 SFF at my
business for many years with great success. I just bought a used IBM / Lenovo
ThinkCentre M58 because is seems to hold faster processors. I know these units
have seen daily use in Schools and business environments so I was wondering if
it would be a good idea to replace some of the major parts of these computers
with NOS? Power supply would probably be the most important to change or at
least clean? Probably a new Hard Drive? Motherboard? Leave it alone or
replace it? Processor? Anything else I should maybe replace? Again, I would
replace with factory spec NEW parts but probably upgrade ram to 4GB and run
the fastest processor the MB could hold. My needs are simple. 160GB. 3.0 ishh
processor. 4GB Ram. I would 2 units. One on XP and one on Win7. More parts
available for the Dell but I have found some Lenovc parts. Good or bad idea? Unless it's broken I wouldn't touch it beyond a good cleaning with compressed air and Windex on the outer case. Practical minimum of RAM today is 4GB to decently run a 64-bit Windows OS. That should work for just about anything you do in a regular office system. Maybe 8GB if you wanted a smoother system and run lots of apps or as I mention below, try VirtualBox.
But I would seriously skip on running XP on anything any longer. No updates, no patches, no support and hardware vendors have dropped support for it as well. If you had to have XP, maybe consider running VirtualBox and load XP in to a virtual system. But I wouldn't dedicate hardware to it any longer.
As to the CPU, for office needs it really doesn't need to be fast. Most office systems are Celeron's, i3's or i5's. Just something with 2 CPU cores is great, or 4 if your feeling generous. If you stay to the lower CPU's then they typically generate less heat which means lower fan noise and a nice quiet office system. Cheapskate!
Cheapskate!