After countless hours of searching the Internet, uploading pictures to your Friendster account then your MySpace account and then your Facebook account (yes, the same pictures), and several handfuls of forwarded messages that had you not sent in 10 minutes or less to 10 of your closest friends would have given you 10 years of bad luck, your PC might be a little pooped! But before you shell out hard earned dollars for a new PC, maybe you should consider cleaning and upgrading that oversized paperweight in to something that doesn’t cause you hours of headaches as you stare in to that blue screen of death.

This may not work on all computers. If you’ve always purchased the ultra budget, dispoasable PC, your options are limited in comparison to the guy who splurged on the top of the line system, but with belts tightening in this slumping economy, it’s worth considering all options. An article on Computerworld tackles this exact problem – revitalizing an aging desktop computer for cheap. It starts with simply opening up the case and cleaning out the dust, moves to replacing RAM and adding an external hard drive, and finishes with a new fan and some overnight testing so you can ‘sit back, enjoy [your] “new” PC, [and] order pizza’.

Changing to a new PC, like changing to a new dedicated server, can be a lot of work and take hours of time to reconfigure, update, and transfer files, and sometimes a more cost-effective solution is to simply upgrade your existing equipment and carefully plan your upgrade for later.