This Old PC: Freshening up hardware for 2010

One of the remarkable things about my experience in personal computing is the current period of relative stability in which I've found myself. In the 1990s I'd build another box every other year or so to keep up with advances in speed needed to keep up with the demanding programs I was running, i.e. games. But my computing habits have changed. I game less, and most of those titles are now on consoles. The most demanding PC game I run now is SimCity 4, and that was released back in 2003.

What this means is that I've been able to get by with the same desktop chassis at home since 2002. It's what I consider a classic, the brilliant SS51G from Shuttle's XPC series. When many enthusiasts were still obsessed with big tower configurations, I chose this toaster-sized box as the foundation of the system I still use today. The oddly translucent blue faceplate is a reminder of the influence that Apple was exerting in product design at the time with its original Bondi Blue iMac.

Within the SS51G's compact dimensions, Shuttle left enough breathing room for what has turned out to be a long life of expansion options. For the past eight years I've been back inside the case to swap or upgrade components several times. (For example, there used to be a floppy drive where the flash memory card reader is now.) This past weekend, I gave this old PC what will probably be its last internal hardware upgrades -- a second gigabyte of RAM and a new videocard.

As long as I had the system unplugged and the case open, it was a convenient time to exorcise all of the dust bunnies that have been collecting for many months. A few minutes with the ever-popular can of compressed air stripped away the fluff clinging to the inner crevices. A couple of tips I thought I'd pass on to readers looking to perform this chore themselves:

• Turn the computer on its side, or even upside-down if necessary, but always keep the can of compressed air upright. Or else be prepared to see liquid propellant squirted into your machine.
• Use a stick-like object to stop fans from spinning from the blasts of compressed air. Not only is it more difficult to blow dust off of moving blades, but remember that DC electric motors double as generators. Who knows what might happen if you start pushing random current upstream from the fan?

Once things were dust-free inside and out to my satisfaction, the new components were swapped in and I was booting back into Windows XP soon enough. The videocard, based on the GeForce 6200 from nVidia, was a bargain-basement purchase, but it should be enough to enable the Aero interface of Windows 7 -- which we'll leave for a future installment of "This Old PC."