When Should I Upgrade My Computer

When Should I Upgrade My Computer

Computers these days are well prices, fast, and dependable. The internal components have come a long way since the 80’s and 90’s. Today we have SSDs and better quality RAM modules that will last for ever. There does come a time when you need to upgrade or replace your computer, we will laydown some of the ways you can tell when its time for a replacement.

Storage Reaching Max

A good time to look into a hard drive/SSH replacement is when you are nearing the maximum capacity of the drive. computers over the last 5 or 6 years have started including an SSD as their primary storage. The drives are fast, dependable and, depending on the storage capacity, cheap.

Typically the default SSD that comes in your computer will have a small amount of usable storage, usually 128 GB or 265 GB. When you find your self filling up the drive you can start looking for alternatives to either upgrade your existing drive to a higher capacity one, or look at adding an additional drive to offload files to.

If you want to see exactly what is taking up all of your storage, the program WinDIRStat is an excellent tool to help shed some light on what is munching your storage.

Not Enough Memory

There was a time when you only needed 512MB of memory (or RAM) for your computer to run. That includes the OS, web browsers, and programs like Microsoft Office. This is no where near the case today. Our productivity now requires Gigabytes of memory for everyday tasks. Most computers will come with 8GB of memory which should be enough for basic web browsing and some content streaming. When you start to do more demanding tasks like video editing, running multiple programs, or even opening a handful of Chrome tabs, you are going to want to add more RAM to your computer.

RAM or Random Access Memory, is an upgradable chip in your computer that is used as a temporary storage place for data that your computer needs to access quickly. RAM is usually much faster than hard drives or SSDs but the information in RAM is cleared when the computer is restarted or looses power.

You can use Windows Task manager to see how much of your RAM you are using at any given time. a good rule of thumb is to have at least 1 to 2 GBs of RAM available at any given time.

In with the New

Eventually you will get to a point where upgrading your internal components does not achieve the performance results you are looking for. This means its time to buy a brand new computer. When specing out your new computer, look for parts that will be relevant for the next 3 to five years, they do not have to be top of the line in that life span but able to perform the jobs you need while you own the device. Some top questions to ask are:

  • Do you want a laptop or desktop?
  • Do you want to play games or casual computing?
  • Should you choose Intel or AMD processors?
  • How much Storage and Ram will you need?

Answering these questions during your research phase will deliver the best results for your next computer. There are so many resources online today that helps with this search, but you can always trust BTT will have you covered.

Featured Image source:

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