Soluto – Anti-Frustration Software. Five Useful Upgrades for Your Computer's Unused Bays (and a Few Ridiculous Ones) 5 Ways to Supercharge Your Laptop For Under $100. Whether you have a 4-year-old notebook or a shiny new system you bought yesterday, you can dramatically improve your PC’s performance and productivity value for less than the cost of a nice dinner out. For less than $100, you can purchase your choice of significant hardware upgrades that will allow you to get more done in less time and put off buying a new system for several more years. 1.
Upgrade to SSD ($80 to $100) There is no single upgrade that will improve your digital life more than going from a standard hard drive to an Solid State Drive (SSD). When we took a 5-year-old Dell Latitude D630 running Windows Vista on a 2.4-GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and tested it with both its original 7,200-rpm hard drive and a speedy Kingston HyperX SH100S3 SSD, it felt like we were using two different computers. In real-world tests, the Latitude D630′s Vista boot time decreased by around 20 percent, falling from an average start time of 37.3 seconds to 31 seconds. 2. 3. Just imagine this situation. 4. 5. Repurpose an Old Computer for Any Room in the House. Make Your Computer More Self-Sufficient This Weekend. How about iTunes? That's how I converted 300 cd's to mp3's.
Configure the settings then just pop in CD's, iTunes automatically records them and pops the cd back out. Try using something like MediaMonkey. You can definitely have it rip and parse filenames as you want, but you need to ensure the tags are correct. I use MediaMonkey to auto-tag and organize my music into the folder structure I want (Music Library\Album Artist\Year - [2DigitDisc#] Album\2DigitTrack# - Title) according to the tags, it works wondrously. IF you are using foobar2000 1.1 or newer then the Converter is part of the core install. FreeDB may not have the cd info so you might want the plugins for MusicBrainz and Discogs. You'll need to setup the converter as per the Wiki article above. As for artwork I use AlbumArtDownloader I also have the Run Service component installed:
Give Your Old, Slow, Overheating Laptop New Life and an Extreme Makeover. How to Silence Your Noisy Computer (and Keep It Cool as a Cucumber) A couple more suggestions: Consider replacing a single, high speed fan with multiple slower fans. Generally, the slower the fan spins, the less noticeable noise will be (even for the same dBA). In my experience, dBA is not truly additive, so a single 40 dBA fan is more noticeable than two 20dBA fans, and may not move any more air. Many cases/motherboards come with PWM ([en.wikipedia.org]) capable connections, which allows the OS to control the fan speed without needing an extra fan controller. If your computer only has a single PWM connector, splitters are available; that way all the fans run the same speed, but can be slowed when not needed. Consider replacing your graphics card (or if you're feeling handy, your GPU's heatsink and fan).
Not for the faint of heart, but consider undervolting. Happy tweaking! How Can I Upgrade My Space for Free or on the Cheap with the Hard Drive Price Surge?