Upgrade Your PC for Back to School
By Mike Agerbo
August 09, 2016
Product Discovery
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If you’re sending one of your kids back to school this year with an older PC, you might want to consider making some upgrades before school starts. Making a few upgrades to an older PC can save you from having to buy a whole new computer while giving it a boost. Here are three upgrades to consider for an older PC that you’re not quite ready to replace.
RAM, or Random Access Memory, helps to keep your system snappy and responsive. In general, I recommend that anyone shopping for a new PC choose one that has the most amount of RAM for the budget. While it’s possible to get storage space by storing files on the cloud or on external hard drives, not having enough RAM can be exceptionally frustrating and more difficult to fix. If you’re running Windows 7.8 or 10, you’ll need at least 4GB of RAM to get the most out of the operating system.
If you have an older PC that could use some extra RAM, you can purchase and install additional RAM yourself or let the professionals take care of it.
If your computer is a few years old, it likely has a traditional hard drive. One of the best investments you can make when upgrading an old system is installing an SSD, or Solid State Drive, in place of its old hard drive. Newer operating systems like Window 7.8 and Windows 10 are actually optimized for SSDs. To learn more about SSDs and why you should consider upgrading to one, check out this post.
Over the past year, SSD prices have fallen considerably. This means that it’s a great time to take the leap and make this upgrade to an older system. If you do decide to do this, make sure you give yourself plenty of time before school starts up again to do it in. A new hard drive will require you to reinstall the computer’s operating system and transfer all your files, so you’ll want some time to work through all of this.
A graphics card isn’t a necessary upgrade for the average user but it can make a big difference for a PC that’s used for gaming. Even for a PC that’s being used for gaming, the other upgrades I mentioned are higher priority but if you’ve already made those and the computer isn’t handling games well, this is the next step before investing in a whole new system. Again, you’ll need to do some research to determine what kind of card you need and I recommend getting a pro to install it.
RAM
RAM, or Random Access Memory, helps to keep your system snappy and responsive. In general, I recommend that anyone shopping for a new PC choose one that has the most amount of RAM for the budget. While it’s possible to get storage space by storing files on the cloud or on external hard drives, not having enough RAM can be exceptionally frustrating and more difficult to fix. If you’re running Windows 7.8 or 10, you’ll need at least 4GB of RAM to get the most out of the operating system.
If you have an older PC that could use some extra RAM, you can purchase and install additional RAM yourself or let the professionals take care of it.
Hard Drive
If your computer is a few years old, it likely has a traditional hard drive. One of the best investments you can make when upgrading an old system is installing an SSD, or Solid State Drive, in place of its old hard drive. Newer operating systems like Window 7.8 and Windows 10 are actually optimized for SSDs. To learn more about SSDs and why you should consider upgrading to one, check out this post.
Over the past year, SSD prices have fallen considerably. This means that it’s a great time to take the leap and make this upgrade to an older system. If you do decide to do this, make sure you give yourself plenty of time before school starts up again to do it in. A new hard drive will require you to reinstall the computer’s operating system and transfer all your files, so you’ll want some time to work through all of this.
Graphics Card
A graphics card isn’t a necessary upgrade for the average user but it can make a big difference for a PC that’s used for gaming. Even for a PC that’s being used for gaming, the other upgrades I mentioned are higher priority but if you’ve already made those and the computer isn’t handling games well, this is the next step before investing in a whole new system. Again, you’ll need to do some research to determine what kind of card you need and I recommend getting a pro to install it.