Useful Upgrades That Will Outlast Your Aging PC

Often the best way to get an old system up to speed is to stay outside the box. Spending a few extra dollars now on an external hard drive or other outside-the-case component can save you time and trouble--and maybe a little money--when you finally do buy a new PC. Not only do external devices offer quick and easy upgrades, but they'll also work with your future PC, so you can subtract those items from the new system's invoice.

Consider buying a bare Serial ATA hard drive, even if your current PC lacks SATA support. Put the drive in a USB enclosure like Addonics' $60 External Drive Enclosure UF, and you'll have an external device that can boost your storage now and easily move on to your next PC as well. Then your SATA drive can move into the new machine, while your old parallel-ATA drive heads to the enclosure. For a quiet external drive, look for a heat-dissipating aluminum housing that doesn't require an additional fan. If you hunt around for an affordable bare drive, you should be able to build an external drive for less than you'd pay for a comparable preconfigured external storage device.

Your system will talk to external USB 2.0 and FireWire drives more slowly than to internal drives connected to the PATA or SATA bus (although these drives are quick enough for most backup and other data storage tasks; see Figure 1Figure 1: External buses can't match the speed of older PCs' internal buses--and even those have been surpassed in newer PCs.). External SATA drives are comparable in speed to internal models, however. You can add an external SATA port to an older PC by installing a host adapter, such as the $40 eSATA II-150 PCI i/e from SIIG.

Buying a "SATA II" product is not essential because no current hard drive can sustain a data-transfer rate sufficient to saturate the 150-megabits-per-second bus on a SATA device as it is. Having the 300-mbps bus supported by the SATA II spec matters only when you are using a multidrive RAID setup. If you buy a SATA II controller card, however, it will support both generations of SATA drives.

An external sound card such as the $80 Audio Advantage SRM from Turtle Beach can improve sound quality and add such high-end audio features as 5.1 or 7.1 surround-sound audio to a ho-hum, value system with mediocre audio capabilities.

Double Up on Audio

I'd like to listen to music through my external speakers and use my Skype headset for VoIP calls at the same time, but Windows doesn't support such simultaneous audio channels. Is there a quick fix?

Jan Holt, Tampa, Florida

Click Start, Control Panel, Sounds and Audio Devices (in Categories view click Sounds, Speech, and Audio Devices first). Choose the Audio tab. To play MP3 files through your speakers, which use the sound card, and to simultaneously use a VoIP headset, which uses its own audio processor, launch your MP3 player, select the sound card as the playback device under 'Sound playback' and 'Sound recording', and then launch your VoIP software and change the playback device settings again. For both, make sure 'Use only default devices' is unchecked. This also works to switch playback between your headphones and speakers.