PC Repair & Upgrade

 My PC (a Dell Inspiron 20-3052 All-in-One) is barely three years old and already it's been giving me trouble, It'd just hang, head out into the weeds and not respond to anything I typed or clicked. Oddly, if I just walked away - sometimes for half an hour - I'd find it had recovered when I returned. Odd!

 My go-to computer guru is Dan Miller who suggested early on it was a hard drive problem. But after diagnosing it further he became convinced it was a memory problem. I give him plenty of credit: he was right in both cases.

 I ordered memory first. It was the cheaper of the two. I also upgraded from 4G to 8G while I was at it. The Timetek memory was $43.99 through Amazon. Dan stopped by on November 28, opened the case on my bed, removed the old memory and installed the new.

 As I told Dan, I wouldn't have wanted to open the case, yet alone attempt any repair work. But Dan just jumps right in and soon enough the case was lying open on my bed.
 Unfortunately, though things were speeded up by the new memory, the glitches continued. Time to order a solid state drive. Dan suggested I not get another standard hard drive.

 So I ordered a Silicon Power 480G SSD ($58.99 at Amazon). I've had a computer since the days of the Mostek 6502 chip in about 1976, embedded on a bare circuit board and it was fairly large. This solid state drive was shopped in a padded envelope. How things have changed!

  Dan switched out the drive on December 5, Pictured above is the old memory (the Timetec package is new) and the old hard drive. The Toshiba drive was manufactured in September 2015 and I bought the PC during the Christmas holidays that same year.

 I can't think that three years is a very long time for this PC to survive  But Dan was able to get the computer running again for less than $103.

 How is it? Perfect. No hangs and it's much faster than before. A sincere thank you goes out to Dan.