Making the Best Gift PC
The best gift PC is a computer that’s as close to new as possible, in terms of both hardware and software. It represents the most work for you, but the reward is a computer that will be as trouble-free as possible, and no one can pull your personal data off the hard drive, because you’ll be replacing it.
Windows works best when it is freshly installed from scratch on a clean hard drive, so if you’re looking to make the computer as trouble-free as possible, reformatting the hard drive and installing Windows from the Windows installation discs is one way to go. But prices of new hard drives have come way down—you can get a 40GB drive for under $60 and a 200GB drive for less than $100—so consider replacing the drive.
The hard drive is the most likely component in an old PC to fail over time, mostly because it has moving parts. After a few years of use, hard drives will eventually stop working and need replacement. And when a hard drive fails, it usually takes the new owner’s personal data with it. A new hard drive can dramatically speed up a machine that had an old, slow drive, and offer much more storage space for multimedia files. And when you remove the old drive, there’s no way someone can undelete or recover your old files, because they were never there in the first place. If the computer is going to a relative, replacing the hard drive will almost certainly save you from anguished telephone calls down the line.
While you’ve got that computer opened up to install a new hard drive, be sure to clean out the dust bunnies—or perhaps a whole dust ecosystem. Cans of compressed air are fine for this job, but be sure to use a pencil or other tool to keep the various fans’ blades from spinning too fast from a burst of air. A mini vacuum cleaner or a dusting brush is handy if you don’t have compressed air. You might want to do this messy job outside.
If you’re feeling generous, a fresh retail or upgrade version of Windows XP is probably best for any computer with at least 256MB of RAM and a Pentium at 700 MHz or higher, but even a freshly installed instance of an older version of Windows (newer than Windows 98) is almost always more stable than cleaning up an installation that’s been running for years. Once you’ve reinstalled Windows, install the applications and utility software discussed earlier.
Tags:Buy, clean_hard_drive, Computer, Hard drive, Hardware, installing_windows, multimedia_files, new_hard_drive, personal_data, storage_space, telephone_calls, undelete, Windows
