Overview
Lenovo h500 windows 8 desktop.
This is my sister's computer. It is an old celeron desktop from 2013. It has windows 8. It used to be very good for playing videos and some light games, but it's getting slow and needs to be replaced. I put in an ssd and a graphics card, the ssd I put in a couple of years ago made a huge difference, the graphics card I put in on 7/4/2022 didn't seem to help. It still works and still plays youtube videos, but the processor is too slow for 2022. It's always been a small, quiet, nice computer.
Graphics Card Installation
Rx550, July 2022
I chose an old radeon rx550 because I hoped this pc would work with it better than a new rx6400, power consumption is slightly lower(but only a 25 watt difference), it's slightly smaller, and its age might make it easier for the old processor to work with it. It was also $99.00. That's cheaper than a gt1030 and at least $60 cheaper than an rx6400. It is also supposedly better than a gt1030 according to its benchmarks. I've also given up on passively cooled gpus, so i was less into the slightly more expensive, slightly less powerful, passively cooled asus gt1030 this time around, it just doesn't seem practical anymore, and i'm more ok with low power, quiet gpus for old pcs now. It works, but I think the processor is still bottlenecked. (The processor is soldered to the motherboard by the way, which is unfortunate, the first idea i had was to upgrade the processor, but i quickly found out it's impossible.) I guess this gpu upgrade had no real effect, so this whole day was probably a failure. Maybe, if i'm lucky, the power supply is a limiting factor. I am not sure how to check that. It has a brick power supply, almost like a laptop, if i find out more about this, maybe the processor throttling could be resolved by a larger lenovo brick plugin power supply from the time, or even one of my laptop power supplies. Even if i can't find any online comments or other resources aboout this, i will still probably just try it and see if it works.
The above slideshow contains pictures of the graphics card upgrade, the inside of the comptuer, and some screenshots of the desktop, which is pretty nice. Everyone hated windows 8 when it was first released, but after microsoft released version 8.1c and then forgot about windows 8, it became like a new version of windows 7. I don't mind the windows 8 tiles replacing the start menu, most people don't control the tiles, so it's a mess, but if you group them and try to make them look nice, it can work. This computer is slow but nice, which is one reason why i keep wanting to fix it. I'll keep it on the future computer wall after I replace it. I plan to replace it in 2023 with a custom build, possibly an i5 12th or 13th gen with an apevia prodigy or fractal torrent micro atx case.