PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Upgrading a PC

Sometimes it’s sensible to upgrade a PC. Other times it’s not. Whether it is economically feasible to upgrade a particular PC depends largely on how old the PC is, its existing configuration, and what you expect it to do.

PCs less than a year or two old are usually easy to upgrade. Components are readily available and sell at market prices. Necessary BIOS upgrades and firmware revisions are easy to obtain. PCs more than two or three years old are harder and more expensive to upgrade. Necessary components, particularly memory and BIOS upgrades, may be difficult or impossible to obtain. Even if you can obtain them, they may be unreasonably expensive. Upgrading one item often uncovers a serious bottleneck elsewhere, and so on. In general, restrict older PCs—anything more than a couple of years old—to minor upgrades such as adding memory, replacing a hard disk or optical drive, or perhaps installing a faster processor. Although you can perform significant upgrades on older systems, it seldom makes economic sense to do so. If an older PC requires more than minor upgrades to meet your expected needs for the next year or so, it’s probably not a good upgrade candidate.

The reason most people upgrade their PCs is to improve performance. The good news is that there are several relatively inexpensive upgrades that may yield noticeable performance increases. The bad news is that some are easier than others, and performing all of them can easily cost as much as or more than simply ...