I am wondering if anyone has knowledge of a device that can be plugged into a old or slow PC to boost its performance.
This would be useful for removing a virus or scanning a PC that lacks the power to do so in a timely manner.
If something like this does not already exist, I will do my best to make it exist. I am thinking that a small PC (A custom MOBO, a CPU, ~1-2 GB of ram, and a very small, most likely custom, PSU). With the right software said mini PC could have one program or process run on it rather than the host PC; which in theory should decrease the time it takes to do said task.
Possibly a modified GPU could do this.
What are your opinions? Has this thought ever occurred to you?
It's called Linux on a (USB) stick. Live boot an appropriate version of Linux, such as Lubuntu, and you can scan or do whatever task faster than you can with Windows.
If your hardware is so slow that it can't even complete a basic task with a clean, minimal OS, you need a new computer, not a "booster box"
So, you're looking to make a diag box of some sort? I mean, a linux boot stick/cd should take care of most of what you describe, though it has to run on the existing computer's hardware. If that's not what you're looking for, then I suppose you could setup something on a mini ITX or Pi like ProSonicLive suggested, but to be perfectly honest I can't think of a way you would be able to just jack it into an existing intact computer to run hardware level scans. Even software scans using remote desktop or file sharing would still be dependent on the target computer's hardware to a large degree.
I mean you might be able to cobble together something that would allow you to run cables from your diag box to the PC and test things like the ram slots, pci slots, AGP/PCIe slots etc by incorporating diagnostic boards into the case. Combine that with a mini ITX board for testing hard drives, PCI cards, graphics cards and ram (though, legacy would be an issue unless you can find some adapters, but even then, you'll only be able to go back so far before the architecture is just incompatible).
To my mind, it sounds like more trouble than it would be worth, and far less convenient than existing methods of testing... but hey. It's your time and money : )
So a piece of hardware that boosts performance, like how you can use a USB stick in Windows to *cough* boost *cough* the memory performance.
There is plausibility in this as we have to example of this working (kinda) first is as mentioned with the USB memory stick, the second is with the little ASIC bitcoin mining USB dongles.
The main problem as I see it is how the system would utilise it. On newer CPUs, as more and more stuff is moved on to the CPU die, and older systems on the chipsets, the CPU is required to organise and orchestrate the operation of the system. Whether this be receiving data from a HDD and moving to RAM or sending instructions to a GPU.
To truly speed the system up would require that the device connect becomes the Host of the system, rather than a client of it. (Like it currently does) With this sort of method the CPU would then become like the older chipsets where actual processing is done else where. This would require some tricky bit of coding but might be possible.
As a side note look up the Rubber Ducky (although this can be done other ways without this) when you plug it in to a system it automatically executes code on that system. So something of this kind to hand off the processing.
However shifting all of the processing power to an Bitcoin mining ASIC has its saturation limits. Mainly the bus between it and the CPU of the computer. The reason Bitcoin mining works well on these, is because it is processing heavy rather than I/O heavy, so there is no risk of the connection bus being over saturated. But say your scanning a HDD for something, on USB 2.0 which has theoretical max bandwidth of 480Mb/s (60MB/s). You are not going to be able to read the HDD as the system could. This problem only gets worse with the speeds of Hybrid and SSD.
For older systems there might be a way to link something like PCI and treat the system as if it is on the other end of a Host Bus Adapter.
Or into a spare DIMM slot. Like how the UltraDIMM allows storage on a RAM interfaced device, you maybe able to add additional processing nodes this way. (BTW this would have incredible uses within datacenters)
It does sound like more trouble than its worth. I'll probably just build my "Brief case PC" and hook it up to the computers HDD if old computer is too slow.
