Fundamental Desktop Upgrades

In the current era of quick wired technological change, it is important to consider sizeable purchases like acquiring a new computer. Before you’ve even gotten it home and out of the box, something more sophisticated and faster has hit the marketplace. It makes sense to do a bit of fore thought and get a PC that will stay important and suitable with regard to your own personal requirements for at least the immediate future. Besides the appropriate attention and maintenance, updates exist that will extend the lifetime of your system. These include upgrading the CPU, memory, graphics card and more.

The first and most vital upgrade for any PC is Random Access Memory. Nothing boosts functionality like attaching all the RAM that the PC can handle. Just be alert to the fact that 32-bit operating systems can just address 4 GB of memory, so if you would like to go beyond that you’ll need to turn to a 64-bit platform. Another simple improvement is the Graphics Card. They’re a snap to set up as they easily plug into any PCI Express slot on the motherboard and can considerably enhance media and graphics rendering.

In addition, switching the initial hard drive to something speedier with much more space is a good idea as hard drives or HDDs are rather cheap these days. Installation packages with all the necessary equipment to upgrade are readily available from a variety of companies such as Seagate, Western Digital and OCZ. Although more expensive than traditional disk drives, solid state drives have the benefits of using much less power, being quieter and better, as well as being more shock resistant. If you’re short on room, or constantly on the go, look at an external hard drives. While you’re tinkering with the hard drive, you may think of getting a Blu-ray player for media. They’re not that costly and can be had for £100 or so.

If you have decided to up grade to a new, more potent graphics card, a second monitor is the ideal way to capitalise on the additional rendering power. Two screens support more successful multitasking and efficiency and give you a lot more room to work. Like virtually every other component, monitors are becoming more of a bargain every day and a decently specced screen shouldn’t run more than £150.

Last but not least, the ultimate upgrade of any computer is the motherboard and the CPU. This is usually the greatest course of action for old hardware that’s definitely beginning to show it’s age. Today’s CPUs from AMD and Intel are amazingly straightforward to change out and the speed improvements are definitely worth it.