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Tutorial: How to make OS X Lion like Snow Leopard

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<img alt="Tutorial: How to make OS X Lion like Snow Leopard" class="aligncenter" height="212" mce_src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.macbookair13-470-75.jpg" src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.macbookair13-470-75.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 12px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="282" /></div>
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How to make OS X Lion like Snow Leopard</h3>
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New features that make your Mac easier to use are always welcome, and Lion is packed with plenty of them, but it also changes a few things that can be hard to adjust to.</div>
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Many of them can be rolled back in System Preferences and in applications' preferences. In addition, there's a bunch of covert settings that can be amended by typing commands into Terminal.</div>
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So, if you're finding it hard to settle in with Lion, here's how to restore a sense of normality to many aspects of OS X.</div>
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The first thing that will hit you is what Apple calls 'natural scrolling'. It makes moving around a document or website more like pushing a piece of paper around your desk, rather than making you interact with artificial elements like scrollbars and a viewport onto a document. Essentially You push the paper away from you to move down, instead of dragging the scrollbar down the side of the document, like you used to.</div>
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Worry not. You can set this method of navigation back to normal in System Preferences. Untick the box under Mouse > Point & Click > Scroll direction: natural.</div>
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The same setting appears in the Trackpad pane. If you've got a Magic Mouse and a trackpad, their scroll direction can be set independent of each other. If your mouse isn't a Magic Mouse, look for Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating at the top of the Mouse pane.</div>
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You may not see this option if third-party software, such as Microsoft IntelliMouse, is installed. Remove that software and reopen System Preferences, and reinstall the software after changing the setting.</div>
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Scrollbars only appear when you begin to scroll. Make them always visible by selecting System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars > Always. Lion's scrollbars have a subtler appearance than the old Aqua blue style. They're also narrower, which makes them harder to grab if you don't have a scrollwheel, and the arrows that moved pages in small amounts are no longer available.</div>
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However, the positive repercussion of bringing back scrollbars is that they serve as a way to orient yourself in a document, which is particularly helpful in creative apps.</div>
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Sizeable change</h4>
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You're not imagining that the traffic light buttons are smaller. This is baked into the system, but the buttons aren't as small as they seem. Their hit areas extend a little way above their tops, providing some leeway if you move the pointer too far.</div>
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<img alt="Sidebar" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.large3supsizedsidebar-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.large3supsizedsidebar-420-90.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
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Conversely, items in the Finder's sidebar are larger than before. There's a new system-wide setting for sidebar icon and text sizes, although not every app adheres to it at present. The Finder and Mail do. Items can be made smaller again, or larger, in System Preferences > General > Sidebar icon size.</div>
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There's no longer a special section in the Finder's search bar for saved searches, or smart folders. Save a Spotlight search and it gets placed under 'Favorites'.</div>
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The old set of default searches are still embedded in the Finder app, but adding them to the sidebar displays a mundane document icon. Recreating them yourself gives them a cog icon that's more distinguishable.</div>
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Another quirk of Lion is that automatically takes you the new All My Files folder every time you open a new Finder window. That's fine for new Mac users who are unfamiliar with the way that the OS X works, but it's frustrating if you're used to seeing your Home or Documents folders instead.</div>
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Luckily a fix is very easy to find: just go to Finder > Finder Preferences and select your preferred destination from the New Finder Windows Show drop-down list.</div>
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OS X has long provided visual hints to give you a sense of continuity – the Genie effect that indicates where to find a window you just minimised, for instance. Animation is used more extensively in Lion. Create a new window in Safari or TextEdit and it zooms into view from the distance.</div>
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Similar cues direct your eyes to dialogs (such as when emptying the Trash) and pop-outs (like Safari's new Downloads list). If you prefer instant appearance, enter this in Terminal:</div>
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defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimations Enabled -bool NO</div>
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To reverse this, substitute YES for NO. Applications will pick up the change after they've been quit and reopened, and the Finder will after logging out.</div>
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Slip and slide</h4>
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<img alt="Mail" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.largeg2mailsappearance-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.largeg2mailsappearance-420-90.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
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Mail has a similar visual trick when you reply to a message. That's governed by a different setting. In Terminal, type</div>
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defaults write com. apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES</div>
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When Mail is running in windowed mode, the reply window will simply appear. In full-screen mode, it will slide into view from the bottom, the same as when composing a new message.</div>
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The differences in Mail run far deeper than that. Its two-pane layout frees up space for reading messages by hiding the list of your mailboxes. Just click Show in the Favorites Bar, just above the list of messages, to bring them back. Space is taken from the message pane to accommodate this.</div>
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The Favorites Bar can be useful even with mailboxes visible, or it can be turned off if you don't want it by selecting View > Hide Favorites Bar. If the three-column layout doesn't work for you, choose Mail > Preferences > Viewing > Use classic layout. This stacks the messages list above the message viewer.</div>
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Even then, messages that are part of the same conversation are grouped under the most recent reply. There might be times when you need to establish the exact order of messages that are part of separate but related conversations. In the View menu, make sure there isn't a tick next to Organize by Conversation so that messages are listed individually and chronologically.</div>
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The new-look iCal and Address Book are controversial, and not just because of their brightly textured windows. Address Book's skeuomorphic design has come in for criticism because it's confusing and unwieldy. Unfortunately Apple has removed an option reported in prerelease versions that switched back to the classic three-column view.</div>
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The author of the MacNix blog has created replacement files that restore a more subdued appearance to both apps. They can be found <a href="http://macnix.blogspot.com/2011/07/change-mac-os-x-107-lion-ical-and.html" mce_href="http://macnix.blogspot.com/2011/07/change-mac-os-x-107-lion-ical-and.html" style="color: #0066cc; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5;">here</a>. Keep backups of the apps and restore those versions before installing system updates. Also be aware that this amends the app in a way that can cause problems that are tricky to pinpoint. A case in point is the technical explanation which can be <a href="http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/2039/safari-keychain-woes" mce_href="http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/2039/safari-keychain-woes" style="color: #0066cc; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5;">read here</a>.</div>
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Safari 5.1 has a new behaviour when you hold Option (or use the right-click menu) to open a link in a new tab. It opens immediately to the right, which matches the way Firefox and Chrome work. If that's difficult to get used to after so long, grab the <a href="http://lrasinen.kapsi.fi/OpenAtEnd/" mce_href="http://lrasinen.kapsi.fi/OpenAtEnd/" style="color: #0066cc; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5;">OpenAtEnd extension</a> to go back to tabs appearing at the far right of the bar.</div>
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Mission control and autocorrect</h3>
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Mission Control</h4>
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<img alt="Mission control" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.largeg1orderofspaces-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.largeg1orderofspaces-420-90.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
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Mission Control makes desktops (previously called Spaces) a mainstream feature. They can't be avoided if you're going to use fullscreen apps. They're organised in a long row, which Mission Control sorts so that the desktops you're using most often move to the left.</div>
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That works well if you use and the left and right arrow keys to jump between apps on adjacent desktops. Things get confusing if you've upgraded from Snow Leopard and have memorised numeric shortcuts to take you to specific apps, or have enabled them in a fresh copy of Lion in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Mission Control.</div>
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You can get into the situation where +6, for example, actually takes you to Desktop 3 because that has been moved to sixth position in the row. To stop this happening, turn off System Preferences > Mission Control > Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use.</div>
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One thing that will grate for heavy users of Spaces is the removal of an overview of app assignments. A less friendly summary can be seen by opening /Library/Preferences/com.apple.spaces.plist in TextExpander or Xcode (both free from the App Store) and looking within the app-bindings key. The values aren't expressed as simple desktop numbers, which makes them difficult to read, but this confirms which apps have assignments.</div>
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Worried about editing the file directly? Temporarily add an app to the Dock, right-click it and look under Options to amend its setting.</div>
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An intuitive way to type accented characters is one of the best adoptions from iOS. Hold down the relevant key to show a pop-up listing the various forms. It comes at the expense of being able to hold a key down to repeat a character. You can get that back as long as you don't mind forfeiting the new shortcut by typing this into Terminal:</div>
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defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false</div>
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Replacing -g with an app's bundle identifier (found by right-clicking it in the Finder, choosing Show Package Contents and opening Contents/info.plist) allows an individual application to override your choice, so you can retain the helpful shortcut in your word processor.</div>
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Lion can spell</h4>
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Wondering why your last tweet or Facebook status contains a word you didn't type? Lion's automatic spelling correction probably kicked in.</div>
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Its inclusion in iOS inspired the mocking damnyouautocorrect.com website. If you find that it grates after a while, you can disable it in System Preferences > Language & Text > Text > Check spelling automatically.</div>
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Lion remembers what was open when you quit many apps, including Safari and QuickTime, and brings it back the next time you use the app. You can force it to forget things by quitting with Command+Option+Q instead. The feature can be turned off in System Preferences > General > Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps.</div>
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That setting doesn't affect Resume, which restores things the next time you log in. This feature works great with an SSD, but not so well with a hard drive and many open apps. It can be suppressed by unticking a box when logging out, restarting or shutting down via the Apple menu, but that option doesn't appear if you use Command+Ctrl+Eject or Command+Option+Ctrl+Eject to restart or shut down.</div>
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If so, create a new Service in Automator. Set it to receive no input from any app. When you're ready to log out, first click the application menu > Services > Quit All Apps to ensure Resume won't bring anything back.</div>
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How to access Safari's Downloads list from the keyboard</h4>
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01. Get FastScripts</h4>
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<img alt="step 1" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step1-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step1-420-90.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
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Safari's Downloads list now pops out of the toolbar, but there's no keyboard shortcut to quickly show and hide it. Red Sweater Software has made a workaround. Download FastScripts from http://red-sweater.com/fastscripts and put the app in the Applications folder.</div>
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02. Download the script</h4>
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<img alt="step 2" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step2-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step2-420-90.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
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Get the script from here. In the Finder, hold Option and choose Go > Library. If a Scripts folder doesn't exist, create it. Inside that you'll need another folder called Applications, and another inside that called Safari. Put the script here.</div>
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03. Configure FastScripts</h4>
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<img alt="step 3" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step3-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step3-420-90.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
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Open FastScripts from the Applications folder. It will ask whether you want it to be added to your login items. Allow it to make this change so that the shortcut you'll set up in a moment will always work whenever Safari is the foreground application.</div>
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04. Check it's installed</h4>
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<img alt="step 4" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step4-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step4-420-90.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
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FastScripts sits in the status area of the menu bar. With a Safari window in front, click it and check you can see Toggle Downloads Popover in the list, then choose FastScripts > Preferences…. The script needs a keyboard shortcut if it's to be useful.</div>
<h4 style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 1.2em; line-height: 1.5em; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
05. Assign a shortcut</h4>
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<img alt="step 5" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step5-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step5-420-90.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
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Click Script Shortcuts. Two folders will be listed below. Expand the one for your user folder until you see Toggle Downloads Popover. In that row, double-click in the Shortcut column and press the combination you want to use. Previously it was Command+Option+L.</div>
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06. One more thing</h4>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<img alt="step 6" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step6-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20239/MAC239.tut_lion.step6-420-90.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;">
In System Preferences > Universal Access turn on Enable access for assistive devices. Switch to Safari to check that the shortcut is set up correctly to reveal or hide the downloads list. You can now monitor downloads in progress without moving the pointer.</div>
</div>
</div>

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In Depth: Is it worth upgrading your old PC for gaming?

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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 24px; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><div style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Times New Roman','Bitstream Charter',Times,serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 19px; margin: 0px; max-width: 640px; padding: 0.6em;">
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter" height="150" mce_src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.opener-200-200.jpg" src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.opener-200-200.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="200" /></div>
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Old PCs can be found everywhere. There are millions of them out there, languishing under beds and at the back of cupboards slowly collecting dust. The poor things, it seems such a shame.</div>
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One of the big advantages of the PC is that you can upgrade easily - or so it's sold by the industry at large. Surely you can take an old machine and, by adding extra kit here and there, turn it back into something worthwhile? What should you upgrade first? Can you just throw a half-decent graphics card into an old rig and make something of it? Can cast-off PCs be made back into useful members of the gaming community?</div>
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Now, enter our base system on which we'll be experimenting. From the dusty recesses of the office, we unearthed a rather neglected desktop. Inside, we had a 2.11GHz AMD Sempron chip coupled to a 512MB Sapphire HD 5550 graphics card and 1GB of RAM, all plugged into a Biostar MCP6P-M2 board and running Windows XP from a 160GB IDE drive.</div>
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Even in its day it wouldn't have turned heads, but now it's almost repugnant. Basically, it's a two-year-old budget system. It's still OK if you just want to run some boring old productivity stuff, but it struggles to render recent games at… well… any settings, really.</div>
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Given the pick of the office's not inconsiderable pile of hardware, we tested various upgrades to see what made a difference and what didn't. Where are the bottlenecks in the performance, and how easy are they to fix? It turned out to be a bit more difficult than we imagined…</div>
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The latest 3D games naturally lean heavily on the graphics subsystem. Very heavily. So all you need to do to turn a mediocre has-been into a gaming powerhouse is add a decent card, right? Bish-bosh, job done. Our base system's Sapphire HD 5550 card is decent enough in its own way, and would be perfectly happy if you stuck to playing around on the desktop, but once you start getting all three-dimensional it begins to fall flat on its pixelated face.</div>
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Our suite of games benchmarks revealed a very sluggish system by anyone's standards - and it's no fun playing games that you know can look a whole lot better.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Graphics card upgrade</span></div>
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First, we tried a Radeon HD 5850. Not quite the cutting edge of graphical goodness, but it's a capable card nevertheless.</div>
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<img alt="GPU" class="aligncenter" height="315" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.asus5850_alpha-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.asus5850_alpha-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="420" /></div>
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We tracked down a 1GB Sapphire 5850 Xtreme, retailing for around £100, at which price you can't complain. It required a 6-pin power connector, which our PSU had, and it's not too big physically, either. Fitting the card was easy, drivers installed, benchmarks away and…</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;">
The results were most disappointing. The 3DMark06 benchmark showed an improvement of less than 6 per cent, and the game benchmarks didn't fare much better.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">World in Conflict</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>did manage a decent boost, getting on for double the frames. However, both<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Far Cry 2</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Lost Planet 2</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>merely added a frame or two, which isn't quite what you might hope for, what with your wallet being £100 lighter.</div>
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Heaven's complete reliance on graphics hardware did at least show us where that money had gone, because the score we garnered from it nearly doubled. Hurrah! Being impressed by artificial benchmarks is all well and good, but what we didn't get in this instance is any decent increase in actual game speeds. Boo.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Time, then, to get a bigger gun. Doubling the budget, we dropped AMD's Radeon HD 6950 in place, which is quite a hefty piece of hardware - literally and metaphorically. At 270mm long, it proved a tight squeeze, but our erstwhile case could take it thanks to the lack of drive bays at the bottom of the machine. It's something to check before you drop cash on a similar upgrade, though, as many older cases weren't designed to handle such beasts.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Power up</span></div>
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After fitting the extra firepower, we fired up the benchmarks and, once again, were completely unimpressed. This time we'd spent twice as much money, only to be more disappointed.</div>
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3DMark06 and Heaven 2.5 actually went backwards a bit and the games themselves weren't much happier. All in all, our new £200 upgrade was rubbish. To be fair to the HD 6950, it does scale much better than the 5850 did, something we saw by cranking up the resolutions. And, of course, we have a card designed for a 64-bit OS and drivers, running on a 32-bit system - which didn't help either way.</div>
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What we've proved here is that a powerful, and expensive, graphics card isn't the magic bullet you might think. There's a hefty bottleneck at play here, and that bottleneck is the processor. Our 2.11GHz Sempron simply can't feed the graphics card fast enough.</div>
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Heaven shows that the cards are doing their thing, but the rest of the system isn't up to it. Spending £100 on a mid-range job is hardly recommended, and spending more is bordering on lunacy. The only advantage in a proper high-power card is that you can easily move it to another system later, so it's not money completely wasted.</div>
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A quick look through the motherboard specification also revealed that our base system is running PCIe version 1.1, while everybody and his pixel-pushing dog is sporting version 2.0. This is another reason for our upgrades failing to impress.</div>
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It's not quite as bad as you might think, though, because the accepted wisdom is that the PCIe bus is so wide that bottlenecks elsewhere are more important.</div>
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Just to prove the point, here are the numbers that matter: PCIe 1.0 and 1.1 shift 250MB/s per lane, in theory. Actually, it fluctuates a bit and (what with overheads and so forth) you really get somewhere between 150 and 190MB/s, which is a maximum of a tad over 3,000MB/s on a 16-lane card - still healthy stuff.</div>
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PCIe 2.0 doubles that, exactly, by doubling the base clock. Running on the older PCIe spec will have cost a few frames per second on our benchmarks, which we can ill afford to drop at these low rates. No matter what is says in the adverts or on the back of the box, a sexy graphics card on its own can't perform miracles. Time to change tactics.</div>
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All these benchmarks are running under DX9, because we're still chugging along under Windows XP. Since we've changed only the graphics card, we've just quoted benchmarks that will show an improvement.</div>
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What we've proved is that just throwing money at the graphics card isn't the answer. The HD 6950 even manages to go backwards (which we put down to the 32-bit drivers). You've been warned: putting a decent graphics card in something too old is a profitless exercise.</div>
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<img alt="GPU bench 1" class="aligncenter" height="276" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/gpu-bench-1-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/gpu-bench-1-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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<img alt="GPU bench 2" class="aligncenter" height="273" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/gpu-bench-2-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/gpu-bench-2-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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<img alt="RAM" class="aligncenter" height="199" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.gskill_ram-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.gskill_ram-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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Throwing decent graphics cards at our test case has proved itself to be a bit of a failure, so it's time to look again at what else we can improve. One easy, and hopefully obvious, solution is to throw some more memory at the rig.</div>
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There are two DIMM slots on the motherboard, but only one of the slots is populated, giving us 1GB system memory; paltry stuff. An extra 1GB stick will set us back only about £12, too. It may not make a huge difference to benchmarks - in fact, we're a little surprised it made any.</div>
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Where the extra RAM does show is during more general use, fiddling around on the desktop, loading files and whatnot. Windows is a greedy fellow and giving it twice as much space to roam means less swap file action and fewer annoying pauses. For the price of a pint and some fish and chips, you can't complain.</div>
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Next, we come to the processor. This is what was holding back the graphics card, so we decided to upgrade to the fastest chip the board could handle. It proved a frustrating business.</div>
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As we dipped into the secret drawer of processors and tried fitting a few, we found that the best the motherboard would take was an ancient Athlon 64 3800+. An improvement over the Sempron, sure, but hardly a huge leap forward. It has only one core, for a start.</div>
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Still, the Athlon is lovely and cheap, and if you can find one new on sale, it'll set you back only about £19 (we checked online and www.novatech.co.uk had some available).</div>
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The benchmarks showed that we did indeed have more mathematical power. Cinebench and X264, both straight tests of number-mangling prowess, proved it. Though not that much more, it must be said.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">World in Conflict</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>was particularly pleased with the new processor, as we anticipated from the more processor-orientated game.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Far Cry 2</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Lost Planet 2</span>, meanwhile, were much less impressed, and the Heaven benchmark didn't budge, which shows how good it is at singling out the graphics card for testing. For under 20 quid, you can't really gripe - our machine is better.</div>
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We've hardly created a gaming powerhouse, though, just a machine that's slightly less rubbish than the one we started out with.</div>
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The next step in the process is clear: we return to our graphics cards and see if the extra oomph helps get the balance back. We fitted our £100 HD 5850 with the new processor and, well, we got pretty much what we expected. A moderate improvement, but hardly worth the money.</div>
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Our new graphics card still didn't have a match in the processor. The Heaven 2.5 benchmark showed that we had all that graphics power on board, but it wasn't translating into good gaming. Although we were closer to our goal, at a total cost of £131 it didn't look like good value at all.</div>
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Getting the balance right between graphics and processor is key to upgrading old rigs. However, before we start to get serious and upgrade the motherboard, which desperately needs doing, we take a different tack again.</div>
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Adding an extra GB of memory does little to our tests, but Windows did enjoy it. Changing over to an Athlon 64 3800+ processor helped for CPU-intensive operations, and showed that graphics and processor work in tandem.</div>
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However, we still needed to upgrade the graphics card to see decent improvements. The HD 5850 now squeezed out a few more frames per second with its new partner than it managed on its own, but it was still being held back.</div>
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<img alt="CPU bench 1" class="aligncenter" height="263" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/cpu-bench-1-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/cpu-bench-1-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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<img alt="CPU bench 2" class="aligncenter" height="263" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/cpu-bench-2-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/cpu-bench-2-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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<img alt="Windows" class="aligncenter" height="158" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.win_7-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.win_7-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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Our faithful old machine was running Windows XP, which is now positively archaic. Is running a 32-bit system holding us back? You may well be upgrading older machines with Windows 7 anyway, but what will it do for your game power?</div>
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While we were at it, we decided to upgrade the storage as well. The 160GB IDE drive was a little small and we had nice SATA connectors on the motherboard doing nothing. What could an SSD do? Blazing speed, obviously - or so we thought.</div>
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Although the BIOS appeared happy, Windows was not. It simply wouldn't boot from an SSD. After initially suspecting the drives, we realised that it was the motherboard again and its lack of AHCI support. There was nothing we could do about that, so it was back to regular HDDs.</div>
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We added a SATA-based 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda, and put a fresh copy of Windows 7 on it. Lastly, we threw two 2GB memory sticks on the board. Well, why not?</div>
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Upgrading Windows cost about £75, the hard drive was £65 and the memory another £30 or so, bringing the cost of this exercise to £170, a not inconsiderable sum. And possibly more than the base rig was worth even new…</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Direct results</span></div>
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Upgrading Windows for gaming purposes has its ups and downs. Yes, you get DX10 and DX11, which means you have all the latest shiny effects and 64-bit code. Plus you get access to a lot more system RAM. If you've got 64-bit versions of software, then you can now run them - witness Cinebench, and the little bit of extra speed it finds.</div>
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It's just as well, because the 32-bit version we used on XP actually runs slower on Windows 7. We could now run our tests under DX10 and DX11. Unfortunately, if the quest is all about speed then this is no good thing. It's far more demanding and the scores subsequently went down.</div>
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However, it turned out that switching back to the DX9 versions of the benchmarks didn't help, either. Sometimes you just can't win.</div>
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We had one last test to consider - to see what moving to a factory-fresh SATA drive and 64-bit drivers had done for our hard drive: wonders, as it transpired. We doubled the average read and write data rate, according to ATTO (though this doesn't show in the games benchmarks, of course).</div>
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Did this mean Windows would boot faster? No. In fact, it was about 15 seconds slower - now a full minute. Sometimes you could just slap Windows… Our upgraded machine at least looked modern, and it gained access to all the latest software.</div>
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In general use, the hard drive and extra memory helped to make it more responsive, but we've still not really addressed the main problem of poor gaming performance. Windows isn't a bottleneck here, then. No matter how attached you are to XP, or to DX9's slight speed edge, you can't hold back the march of time. You've got to upgrade Windows eventually, and while it'll give little improvements here and there, it'll do nothing for gaming other than frustrate you when you try to run DX10 and DX11 stuff.</div>
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Looking for the performance upgrade, then, we don't think it's money well spent here, either.</div>
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Upgrading Windows isn't cheap, which might explain why Microsoft has so much money. Our upgrade from XP means that 64-bit software and DX10 and DX11 are ours. What it doesn't do is make our system any faster, although the desktop looks nice and modern.</div>
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As ever, Windows gets more demanding. This is no performance upgrade, and if anything it only highlights the inadequacies of our box. It isn't always very good at running 32-bit software, so you might find that things actually go backwards. Still, our hard drive upgrade is a nice one; £65 brings an almost 10-fold increase in storage, as well as a doubling of the data rate.</div>
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<img alt="Win bench 1" class="aligncenter" height="276" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/win-bench-1-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/win-bench-1-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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<img alt="Win bench 2" class="aligncenter" height="254" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/win-bench-2-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/win-bench-2-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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<img alt="Motherboard" class="aligncenter" height="158" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.drmos-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/PCF254.feature3.drmos-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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Now then, time to get serious. All we've learned from our mucking about upgrading this and that is that what we really need is to fit a decent processor - and our motherboard is too old for that. So it's time to change the board.</div>
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Since this is a biggish job, there's no sense in aiming too low. We went straight for a six-core Phenom II 1090T. At about £150 a pop, they're not cheap, but we'd finally have oodles of six-core power. Our new board was an Asus M4A89GTD Pro, about £90 worth and capable of interesting overclocking experiments. On top of this, we'd need new memory: a pair of 2GB DDR3 sticks added £32-ish. All this brings the bill to about £250 - about half the cost of a modest new PC.</div>
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Remember, we're still running everything under XP with a pedestrian 512MB graphics card. Heaven 2.5 once more refuses to budge. It doesn't matter how much processing power you throw onto the board, it's all about the graphics card here.</div>
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3DMark06, which is much more skewed to CPU power, at last gets a decent hit, nearly doubling. The two CPU benchmarks, as you might have guessed, go ballistic. It all goes to show just how fast processor development is; a decent modern chip will absolutely slaughter the old guard. The machine also feels completely different at the desktop, nice and responsive.</div>
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Right, we've spent £250 and started to get interesting scores, but now our system is unbalanced again. Where once it needed processing power to match the card, now it desperately needs graphical power. So it's back to our HD 5850 and 6950 cards and more furious benchmarking to see whether we can at last get some decent chuffin' results. Which we can.</div>
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The HD 5850 finally has a chance to run and we have, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, decent playable speeds. The 3DMark06 benchmark nearly doubles again and Heaven more than doubles.</div>
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The game benchmarks start responding, too. At last, our upgrade candidate is a games machine, which is just as well as we've now spent £350 and it's still running an obsolete OS on an IDE hard drive.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Smart money</span></div>
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Spending another ton to move to an HD 6950 doesn't repeat the trick, though. Since we're sticking to our original resolutions of 1,280x1,024, it doesn't have a chance to flex its GPU muscles. At these more sedate dimensions, and with no 64-bit drivers, it's not much better than its older cousin.</div>
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Again, spending the extra here would be something of a waste, which did surprise us a little - we expected more for our money now it was on a decent board.</div>
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The law of diminishing returns is in full effect in the world of graphics cards, and those last few frames get costly. We were really tempted to combine the Windows and drive upgrades with the processor and motherboard and graphics card upgrades to see what the result would be. At least, we were until we started adding up the figures and realised that way madness lay.</div>
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At this point, all that would have been left of our original box would be the case, power supply and optical drive, and our upgrade would have set us back about £500. This isn't really an upgrade, it's building a whole new rig. Time to calm down and think again.</div>
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Upgrading is one of the PC's great advantages, but it's a fast-moving field and machines are quickly left behind. To be realistic, after more than a couple of modest upgrades of an ageing computer, it's time to stop and think carefully about what you want the machine to do. It's possible to waste quite a lot of money on something that's never really going to perform well enough to justify the subsequent lightness of your wallet.</div>
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This is the big upgrade. It's also the most expensive, but it doesn't half make a difference. Suddenly, our tired old rig has a spring in its step. Although it needs a new graphics card to carry the extra power right through to the game frame rates, we're at last in decent, playable territory.</div>
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We jolly well should be, as it's cost £350 to change the board, chip and memory, and add an HD 5850. Notice that stretching another £100 to the 6950 again proves to be a waste, at these resolutions anyway (1,280x1,024).</div>
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<img alt="Mobo bench 1" class="aligncenter" height="289" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/mobo-bench-1-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/mobo-bench-1-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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<img alt="Mobo bench 2" class="aligncenter" height="359" mce_src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/mobo-bench-2-420-90.jpg" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20254/mobo-bench-2-420-90.jpg" style="border-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px auto 12px; max-width: 640px;" width="252" /></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Conclusion</span></div>
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So we've answered our original question. Yes, you can turn an old dog into a gaming machine - of course you can. You just can't do it without spending rather a lot of money and replacing nearly everything, making your old PC a bit of a Trigger's Broom (or Ship of Theseus, if you're more classically minded).</div>
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Once upon a time, you could beat the system by building rigs out of bits and it would be cheaper. Even if you had only a couple of major components, it was worth buying the rest separately. Those days are long gone.</div>
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Today, margins are tight, competition fierce and progress rapid. You'll rarely put together a decent system out of separates and save money. The same goes for any major upgrading. The balance between processor and graphics card is all-important: too much either way is wasted effort.</div>
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And watch those resolutions, too. If you don't run a big monitor then many high-power cards aren't as attractive as they think they are. For instance, witness our 5850 and 6950 scores with the Phenom 1090T at 1,280x1,024 - is that really worth £100 to you?</div>
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The PC is made of parts, but works as a whole, and you need to upgrade it with this in mind. The cost of fitting fast, modern kit is dissipated unless all of the sub-systems can cope. This effectively means that any serious upgrade means a new board, chip, graphics and RAM. And at this point you need to consider costs carefully.</div>
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Looking again at our original test system, all we can really recommend is adding another GB of RAM and hunting down an Athlon 64 chip. This would cost a reasonable £31 and gives a little boost all round - nothing spectacular, but the desktop feels much more lively and you get a few frames a second more here and there.</div>
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Maybe scouring other piles of old hardware or eBay for a better graphics card would be worth it, but getting serious about upgrading it proved to be an expensive and frustrating experiment.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Drive time</span></div>
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The only upgrade that really worked was the hard drive. Switching to a modern SATA drive had an immediate effect and, although not speeding up games as such, made everything feel more lively. You can never have too much storage, either, and drives are easy to transfer between systems.</div>
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You can get a lovely, all-shiny, all-new, all-sorted-out proper games rig for £750 (take a look at Chillblast's Fusion Rocket). You'll get a nice new version of Windows, too, plus big, fast drives, a new keyboard that isn't full of crumbs, and a new mouse and all the rest.</div>
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It pains us to say it, but it's worth saving up and getting a new box if you're more than a couple of years behind the curve. It's tempting to think that you can upgrade some faithful old PC you found hidden away somewhere into a games box, but once you've passed a certain point it's time to take the old fellow out for a long walk, with a spade in one hand and a shotgun in the other.</div>
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In Depth: Is it worth upgrading your old PC for gaming?

Old PCs can be found everywhere. There are millions of them out there, languishing under beds and at the back of cupboards slowly colle...