Looking for AX3960 Manual or start up guide

reestit

This is my first time here despite having an Aspire desktop for a lot of years - never knew it existed - and looking for help for my old computer.
My old computer is feeling her age and is taking longer to wake up in the mornings!
Looking to see if I can ease her in gently by knowing what really needs to be running at startup?
Also looking for a manual / guide to see how best care for her in old age!

Thanks for any help.

billsey

Your Aspire X3960 is an oldie (2nd gen processor, so vintage 2010 or so), so it's no surprise it's starting to show that age. There are a couple of small upgrades you can do to help though. First an most important is replacing the original HDD with a new SSD. You have four SATA ports on the motherboard, with likely two different colors. Two are SATA 2.0, two are SATA 3.0. Your ODD is probably plugged into a SATA 2.0 port, the HDD in a SATA 3.0 port. You are going to want to put your new SSD into one of the SATA 3.0 ports.

When you pick up the SSD also get a 2.5" to 3.5" drive mounting adapter and an empty external drive case that has USB 3.0. Best at this point is a case that will fit the old 3.5" drive so you can repurpose yours as an external.

With everything together, open your machine up and remove the drive cage, you'll have to remove the front bezel to get access to all the screws. Pull the old 3.5" drive out and put the new 2.5" SSD in using the adapter. Reconnect everything and reassemble. At this point the system will not boot, because the new drive doesn't have anything on it. Put the old drive in your external case and connect it to one of the USB 3.0 ports in the back and boot into the BIOS. Go to the Boot Options tab and select the USB drive as the first boot device and the SSD as the second. Save and exit. At this point it should boot from your old drive, albeit even slower than normal.

Once Windows is up and running download a disk clone utility like Macrium Reflect and clone the old drive to your new SSD. Depending on the original drive size you might have to have it change your C: partition to be smaller or larger on the new drive (your machine could have shipped with anything from a 160GB drive to a 3TB drive). When the clone is complete shut down and disconnect the external drive. Reboot into the BIOS and set the SSD as first boot device and boot up to Windows. It should be *much* faster!

Any additional upgrades will be dependent on your current system and likely will be a memory upgrade. Your system supports a maximum of 16GB using all four slots and if you already have 8GB or more you likely don't need an upgrade there. If you have 4GB or less we'll want to look at an upgrade.

reestit

Thanks for the advice billsey - it is as I thought age is getting to her but she is not too bad yet. Unfortunately I have never been inside a computer in my life, however I shall look for instructions for what to do to see if it is possible for me to carry this out.

billsey

If you are uncomfortable getting inside then likely it's better to have a technician do it for you. It's not a difficult job for them and doesn't take all that much hands on time, the clone process takes the longest and they can be working on someone else's machine while that happens.