Introduction This series of articles compliments our video series on the same topic. Indeed, the basis for the articles are each video in order. But as we stripped our old PC and then built a new one inside the old chassis, we took a whole heap of extra photos for this article series. And as we’ve gone to write the articles we’ve added in all those things that weren’t said in the videos. Little nitty-gritty bits of advice that make the whole process that much smoother.
So, what’s this series all about? Well, unlike the 1980s and 1990s, unless you’re an avid gamer with a healthy budgets for PC parts, you may not have upgraded your PC in several years, maybe even five years … more! So we thought it would be relevant to produce a video series about upgrading a five year old PC, something we happened to have sitting around the labs. 
The computer in question is the Black Widow. We actually built this for the trade show Computex 5 years ago. It won all sorts of awards back then. 
It’s a beautiful case which has a gorgeous Black Widow airbrush design on it. But the focus of this series is not the Black Widow PC at all, it’s how hardware has changed over the last five years. As we remove the old hardware we’ll compare it with the new, to explain how things have changed.
Our goal is to help you understand the differences in technology in PCs so that when you go out to buy hardware for your computer to upgrade it or if you want to take your computer into a shop to get a technician to upgrade it for you, it will help you understand what they say when they say ‘you have to throw out your old RAM which is DDR2 because the motherboard you’re purchasing is DDR3.’ Not only will you lose the goofy blank stare on your face, you’ll know what they’re talking about! |