Hardware such as Dell PowerEdge R840 lifetime does not need to be minimized. The machines will last much longer with maintenance, certain care, and a few more tools.
The story is always the same: we buy a new computer, modern and fast, but with a few months of use and several new programs installed, the machine starts to get slower and less efficient.
The first solution that comes to mind is the almost instantaneous obsolescence of electronics these days, and soon we want to change the computer for a better and more powerful one. But is this necessary?
- Replace Computer Hard Drive
New, powerful computers often seem sluggish simply because the read speed of hard drives hasn’t evolved as much over the years. Fortunately, there are SSDs.
Unlike a traditional hard drive, the SSD (Solid State Drive) has no moving parts or disks that need to rotate. Instead, they use high-speed flash memory, similar to current USB sticks. The lack of heads and hard drives make speeds more than ten times faster than normal HDDs.
Therefore, despite being small, they are great for installing the operating system and the most used programs, leaving larger HDDs for file storage. And adding an SSD to an existing system isn’t difficult: they fit into the machine like any HDD, and just having the most used programs installed directly on them can have a lot of effects.
- Use An External Storage System
External storages such as external hard drives or cloud storage are valid options to take the file clutter out of the operating system. Large and old files can be saved on external hard drives, but which are important enough not to be deleted.
This way, you can free up space and streamline the operating system, no longer having to keep these files locally and increasing their lifetime, since an external hard drive stored in a proper place (dry and dust-free) maintains their data integrity for decades.
- Have A Good Antivirus System
One of the problems that can show the age of hardware is the accumulation of viruses, and nowadays, just having an antivirus is not enough anymore.
It may be interesting to check the ranking prepared by Av-Test to choose yours. The organization tests monthly on all the most common antivirus programs on the market, using the most malicious viruses today and classifying the programs with grades for each operating system in terms of protection, performance, and usability.