Improvements that Could Be Made to a Computer System

One improvement that could be made to the computer system is by adding either a power line adapter or a WIFI USB dongle. The reason for this is because the user has specified that they cannot connect the computer system to the internet using a cable as it far away. You can purchase a power line adapter for £35 which is decent. A power line adapter can increase the range in which the WIFI can reach and it also can increase the internet speed. As the router is far from the computer system the power line adapter will allow the user to connect to internet if there is a power plug near the router and near the computer system. As the user is going to be doing video editing and I.T, he may need to download resources from the internet therefore this is why I believe this is an important improvement which needs to be made. On the other as the user doesn’t have much money a cheaper way to get the computer system to connect to WIFI is by using a wireless WIFI USB dongle. You can get this for under £10 and the WIFI speed is still good. Unlike the power line adapter this is less visible. The way this works is you plug the USB dongle into the computer and install the software which comes on a DVD. The drivers are then installed and then you can connect to the internet.
In addition to this another improvement which could be made to the system is adding more RAM. I recommend the user to add a minimum of 2GB more RAM which will give a total of 4GB RAM. By adding more RAM there will be an instant improvement in performance and everything will run a lot smoother. The user will have the ability to open and run multiple applications and programs at the same time without having any issues and having the software crashing. In addition to this the boss has indicated that the user is going to use the computer to edit videos and pictures. Most editing programs such as Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop and Sony Vegas require a minimum of 4GB RAM to actually run. Furthermore, the user can also use a ReadyBoost USB flash drive which will use the USB’s cache to increase the performance of the read disk. As the user doesn’t have enough money this is an extremely cheap way to increase the performance of the computer system. It’s basically a cheap alternative to adding more RAM if you find 4GB RAM isn’t enough.

Also the user can improve the computer system by adding a larger hard drive. Currently the system has a hard drive space of 150GB which is small. You can purchase a 500GB hard drive for around £40. As the user is video editing and photo editing, there will be many files which are big in size and 150GB simply won’t be enough. if the computer system remained to have a hard drive size of 150GB, as it gets more full, the performance will decrease therefore having a larger hard drive is better.

The user can also add an SSD and replace it with hard drive. An SSD has many benefits such as its faster than are hard drive. This is because there are no moving parts involved in the SSD. As the user will be transferring a lot of files on the computer such as videos and photos which are large in size, the SSD will be a better option. The user also has the option of purchasing a caddy external hard drive enclosure and putting the hard drive in it and use it as a backup so they could then use the SSD as the main drive. This will in a way give the system more memory to work with as there are 2 drives.

Another way the user can improve the performance of the computer system is by changing the operating system to a Linux OS. Firstly, Linux is a free software which is a benefit to the user as they do not much money. Moving on the operating system doesn’t need to acquire more resources to run which can improve the performance by a noticeable amount. Linux is also open source which means the user has more freedom and can make more changes than they could with Windows.