On one of my visits with my younger sister, I happened to notice an abandoned, dusty, purple HP Pavilion in the corner of her bedroom. When asked about it, she told me it was slow, glitchy, and irritating to use. If there's one thing that I can't stand, it's writing off a PC as dead before I've had a chance to revive it. I offered to take a crack at it and see if I could get it running again.
Booting up this dinosaur revealed to me the first problem: it was installed with the famously reviled Windows 8. The response times of the cursor and keyboard inputs were also lackluster at best. She mentioned she thought it might be infected with a virus, so I asked if she wanted me to try to recover any files that might be on it. She said she didn't care, which made my job easy. Time to nuke the drive and start from scratch.
I tried installing Windows 10 on the stock drive as a crap-shot. Predictably, since it's an old machine with an old HDD and only 4gb of DDR3 ram, it ran terribly. However, since it's an old machine, that means parts are usually more inexpensive. I purchased a compatible new SSD and one more 4GB stick of DDR3 RAM to perform a small, but meaningful upgrade.
With more RAM and more SSD storage, the thing ran perfectly fine. My sister isn't very performance intensive as a user, so I figured these upgrades would be perfectly adequate. And for a pretty fair cost!
I also added a little surprise.
Some of our favorite memories together when we were little were spent in the Sims. Given that the game is old, I elected to install the Sims 2 on the PC for her to play. It ran seamlessly!
Fortunately, my sister was extremely pleased with the gift of a "new" PC. Unfortunately, I may have also revived a Sims addiction.
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