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Got an old computer system and deciding on buying a whole new one? Thinking of totally giving up your old computer for auction or for the garbage? Hold that thought. There might still be parts of your computer that you can still salvage and re-use.

You can save your old RAM if it is totally compatible with your new system. If you have a graphics card that is not soldered on-board, you can re-use that to have the ability of a dual monitor system. Your network card might also be re-usable if it is not on-board (and if you have spare slots on your new computer). More than those mentioned (and many more), there is also your hard drive which you can re-use to more than just the benefit of having additional storage space but also to improve your system's performance.

Most hard drives now have gigs and gigs of drive capacity. That is why most technicians and computer professionals tend to do drive partitioning when formatting a hard drive. Your old hard drive, when installed in your new computer system, can act as an addition partition especially in cases when the new computer has been pre-formatted and all set up before you purchase it and you are not given the option of partitioning it or not.

What benefit does the additional drive (acting as a partition) does to your computer? It allows for separation and allocation between system-related files (like Windows, Office and other software installation files) into one drive and data-related files (like your documents, pictures and the likes) on the other partition. Providing for this ability of system and data files separation gives more protection to your data. For example, in any case that the computer's operating system needs to be re-installed or the system hard drive be reformatted you wouldn't need to worry about losing your data files because all you have to do is format the drive where the system files are.

Another good use of your old hard drive is to provide additional arm for page file cache as it acts as a virtual memory. A Virtual memory serves the same purpose as a RAM does. Although using your hard drive as a page file cache wouldn't give the same amount of speed as to using a RAM for paging, but still it is considered a big help. Ideally, your page file should be set at least twice the size of your RAM. For example, if your RAM is 1GB then your initial page file size should be 2056 MB. Usually if the computer has just a single hard drive, the virtual memory is set to consume space from the primary drive.

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