One of the best ways to know what to improve about your system is to find out what is in your system. You can do this by downloading CPU/Z for starters, and then use that program to determine your CPU, RAM, Speeds, Motherboard…etc Once you determine this information you can use the general rule of thumb below to help you find the best way to gain some minor performance enhancements.

#1 – If you are running an older system (think pre dual-core) then there isn’t much you can do for CPU speed, but if you have less than 1GB of ram, double your RAM to 2GB will give you a noticeable improvement. Especially when it comes to having multiple applications open at the same time. Go to NewEgg, or Pricewatch and find your model of RAM, make sure you install and exact match, if you can’t find one, buy two sticks of identical memory that will fit in your motherboard.

#2 – If you are running an older video card with less than 64mb of RAM or are using the motherboard video card, then get a separate or improved video card. Video cards built into the motherboard are shoddy and take away from your system memory to feed the video. Make sure you have at least one free PCI Express, or if you are running older systems, PCI/AGP slot to accept the new video card. If your system is older, don’t go overboard going from a motherboard video card to a 128mb Geforce 7200 or something like that can give you worlds of improvement for under $100, and you can play some of the 3d games out there.

#3 – If you are still running Parallel ATA (flat ribbon cable) hard drives and your computer does take Serial ATA drives, then you might want to upgrade. Especially if you are running out of hard disk space. Serial ATA drives are much faster and for extended read/writes they have a significant boost vs the old parallel drives. Programs will load faster, windows will load faster…etc. Just remember, if your primary disk is a Parallel ATA, or you only have 1 parallel ATA disk and Windows is installed on it, you will either need to install your Serial ATA drive as a secondary drive, or you will have to reinstall your operating system. Windows XP SP2 or lower cannot read Serial ATA drives without some driver disks, so I would only make your primary drive a Serial ATA drive if you are running Windows Vista.

You can pretty much gain benefit from each one of those columns for around $50 – $99 dollars, if you have 1 GB of RAM or less, than doubling your RAM to 2GB will give the most noticeable speed boost. Especially if you are trying to run Vista on 1GB of ram, but the video card or hard drive upgrade will help for day to day program loading, especially if you play some games or have kids that do.

-Dragon Blogger

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