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| (2) 8GB Computer Memory Sticks |
I bought 16 gigabytes of memory for my aging HP desktop computer. I kept running into a wall whenever I had a dozen of so tabs open and was trying to get things done. I would click one more thing and the system would freeze up for a minute or three while it busily hammered away at the disk drive, trying to get all its ducks in a row.
My friend Jack will just keep opening new tabs on his browser. He sometimes ends up with upwards of 200 open tabs. When I inquired as to how much memory he had installed he replied that it was full up. So I finally bit the bullet and shelled out $50 to replace the 4 GB of memory in my computer with 16. It does seem to run a bit smoother now.
I acquired this computer five years ago and it was used then. You can now buy something similar with a 19 inch monitor, keyboard and a one terabyte disk drive for under $200. Of course, you're stuck with Windows, unless you want to install Linux yourself.
To me, another real, modern, performance enhancer is an SSD. For decades, I replaced my PC every few years because Windows just got so bloated that the system got laggy. I assumed all along that the bottleneck was the CPU and RAM. Then I discovered the solid-state disk (SSD). It turns out that the mechanical magnetic hard drive is a major bottleneck, especially for a paging system like Windows. Replacing a magnetic hard drive with an SSD will breathe new life into an otherwise slow-but-functional PC. I have done it several times and, in each case, I kept the old hard drive as a second, data-only, drive (like a D: drive). And I don't even do the upgrade myself, cause I'm a techy chicken. I know a guy who will provide the new SSD, install it, and gas-pump my old OS onto the new SSD. All for about $200. I don't know how old my PC is, but it has a 7th gen i7 in it and is running W7. My wife has an even older PC (with SSD) that she uses for running 3D printing software.
ReplyDeleteYour pal,
Chris
Chris is correct. I have an SSD for the systems and programs, plus 2 huge discs (3TB) in RAID-1 for my data. The SSD has dual boots, Linux and Windows.
ReplyDelete