REACH FOR YOUR WALLET
Upgrade Your Drive
31 SSD storage used to be expensive, but nowadays affordable SATA SSDs are commonplace. Even smaller M.2 drives (around 120GB) are quite cheap, with models from reputable manufacturers costing as little as $25. Using one of these as a main OS drive guarantees faster boot times, and there’s no need to get rid of your old drives; they can become bulk storage for files that don’t need to be rapidly accessed. Note: Win 10 takes up at least 20GB, so buying a really y tiny y M.2 drive isn’t a great g plan. p
More Memory
32 If your system is running slow, upgrading the RAM can often provide that extra bit of oomph it needs. It’s also one of the easiest components to upgrade, especially if your system has excess DIMM slots. For modern systems, 8GB of memory should be considered the absolute minimum amount, with 16GB working perfectly well for most tasks. If you use video-editing or rendering software on the regular, though, upgrading to 32GB or even 64GB might be a good g call.
Move Beyond Integrated Graphics
33 Rocking a new budget system with integrated graphics is no bad thing; modern APUs are great, and with Intel’s 10th-gen
Iris Plus chips headed to desktop (eventually), integrated graphics are in a great place right now. However, if you’re still rocking an older dual-core APU, it might be time for an upgrade. That could just mean jumping up to a newer processor (such as AMD’s excellent Ryzen 5 3400G), or it might mean getting a GPU. Snap up a Radeon RX 550 for under 100 bucks, or aim a little higher and snag something like an RX 570 or Nvidia’s trusty
GTX 1050 Ti—neither should break the bank, but will smash integrated graphics on older APUs.