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Avast Blog_Tips & Advices: The ultimate guides to Getting your old PC ready while wor
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Your one stop to secure, optimize, and tweak your PCs to keep your PC ready for work, grandparents or kids

The last few weeks  have been and continue to be a challenge for everyone working from home. The web is already full of often generic “How to work from home” advice: Dress the part, keep up normal hours, get up regularly….you’ve read them all by now! Rather than giving you tips that you’ve heard before, I would like to give you practical tech tips & guides based on how to set up PCs properly for home work, what issues you will need to overcome, and how to end up working faster than before. These guides will be based on:
  • 20 years of working remotely on laptops and PCs: What I use, how I am set up, how I maintain my machines
  • 3 weeks worth of nonstop questions: I’ve been asked by almost all of my friends, many co-workers and family members on not just “best practices” to keep from going insane locked in, but practical advice on getting their PCs and phones fit for home office (both old and new), ranging from “My Wifi sucks, help me!” to “Hey I’ve got an old PC - can I use that for my home office”? 
This guide will help you not just get set up at home, but also get you started with kick-ass equipment and tools as well as troubleshoot the most common issues! Note that this list will be expanding over the next few days and weeks, so stay tuned for more!
Ready?

Revive your (old) PC for Your Work, Kids, or Grandparents!

An old PC can be a true lifesaver in these days of isolation: Here’s how to breathe new life into an aging PC and get it ready for your personal home office, your kids, or grandparents. 

Got an old computer in your household? With the world staying at home for the most part, it’s time we put it to good use. Almost any old PC can be saved from the junkyard and turned into a workhorse or second device to hand to your kids or grandparents these days. You can even turn an old device into a dedicated video conference device. 

In this article, I’ll show you what it takes to get an old PC working again, whether it’s 13 years or 1 year old. In the end you’ll get it fit and ready for:
  • Work from Home: Your company can’t hand you a laptop and is asking you to use your own device? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

  • Family machine : Enable your children or parents to learn from home (and perhaps entertain them with the occasional game)

  • Video Conference: Devote an older machine to video conference so you can connect with friends and colleagues.   
The device we’re reviving in this article is a 13 year old Desktop PC sporting an ancient Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB Hard Disk, which I haven’t turned on in more than 5 years, so there was a lot of work ahead of me,without further ado, time to roll up my sleeves and breathe some life back into it!

1. Before we start: Is my PC too old?T

he PC in question is ancient by today’s standards. However, having performed all tips in this article, the computer ran Windows 10 and Office fine. The web felt reasonably smooth, as long as you don’t work with more than 10 tabs at the same time and video playback was stutter-free. Even games from the era ran fine. 

However, you will hit the ceiling (or rather bottom) of how old you can go: 

I tried experimenting on a bunch of retro PCs from the 90s and early 2000s to see how far back we can go….

The results didn’t surprise me: While there are guides that help you trim down Windows 10 so that it can run on almost everything, by default it would only install on a 2005-era “Pentium 4” computer as the others don’t have the required CPU specifications. But even if you get it to work, the experience will be terrible. 

Any midrange to high end device from 2007-2010 should be considered the absolute minimum: But even then you will need to make sure that your processor is compatible. Chances are that it might run slowly, so you should look into upgrading its memory or hard disk (more below). 

2. Before you turn it on: Check for dust bunnies

Digging up my 13 year old desktop PC, the first order of business was opening it up and checking its insides. Suffice it to say, it didn’t look good:

Both the CPU and power supply were clogged in dirt and dust bunnies. This can easily lead to overheating and random shutdowns, so if your PC or laptop turns off randomly you should look at cleaning it inside out. Two ways I got rid of it was a vacuum to suck and then a compressed air can to blow them all out. 

My advice: Do it outdoors if you can. I had enough dust in that desktop PC to cover half of my living room in a cloud...
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