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The Computer Map

You purchase a spanking new, state of the art computer. Eighteen months or so later and you find that the technology has moved on. What do you do, buy another PC or upgrade your old one.
In most cases you may find that frequent upgrades are a better option to buying a new system every couple of years.

In 1990 I purchased a mini tower, 286 16Mhz system. It cost me almost £900, a bargain at the time. Since then I have carried out a number of upgrades. Whenever the CPU, or mother board fell below £100, I upgraded.

In 1992 I fitted a 386 main-board and a 486 board in 1994. Also in 1994 I added a faster IDE I/O board, I had already replaced the VGA video card for a super VGA card the year before.

A year later I replaced my 33Mhz 486 CPU with a 100Mhz type. The fall in memory prices that year enabled me to increase my memory from 8M to 16M.

Recently I upgraded to a Pentium P166 by replacing the motherboard and CPU on my 486 system. From the bits collected over the years I have been able to build a second 486 machine.

Although a background in electronics can help, be assured  that upgrading the modern PC is quite straight forward, as long at you have had some elementary knowledge of the basic components that make up the system.

In this series, I will be examining the PC computer hardware structure. There will be a brief description of the operation of the sub-systems and how they fit into the overall system. If you feel confident you may then plan simple upgrades of your system in the future and, save yourself some money.

Shown below is a block diagram of the sub-systems that make up a desktop PC. To find out more about the system place your mouse pointer and 'click'on the section name you are interested in

Computer Map