IT’S TIME TO BRING IN THE NEW YEAR AND THE UPGRADES!

IT’S THE NEW YEAR, and there’s no better way to celebrate than to upgrade your PC—at least, that’s how tradition runs in my house. With the holiday season over, a lot of online retailers tend to put out some good deals, since sales are slower, and the market is ripe for bargains.

Of course, there’s the option of buying a completely new system, but if you have a decent rig already, an upgrade or two might transform your old 2016 pedaler into a modern 2017 model. There are several ways to pump some new life into an aging system. A year in the tech world is a long time—things go by quickly!

For me, it’s time to ditch my spinning disks for a solid-state system. This means getting rid of all hard drives and replacing them with much faster SSDs. You do lose some capacity, but terabyte SSDs are coming down in price. If you can store all your data on a 1TB or 2TB SSD, it’s worth eating ramen for a while.

In 2016, 16GB of memory seemed like the de facto standard. But I feel 16GB is a bit cramped; 32GB is the sweet spot in my opinion. If you’re still hanging on to 16GB, now’s the time to get a new kit. But here’s a pro tip: Just adding additional DIMMs isn’t the best way to go. Instead, it’s better to remove the old sticks and buy a completely new kit in the capacity that at you want. This is because manufacturers rs bin kits, meaning individual sticks are re selected for a match, and sold as a kit. it. Buying another kit later on, even if it’s t’s from the same model set and same me manufacturer, may end up causing ng issues. It’s rare, but it does happen.

Depending on what you’re upgrading, things can go smoothly, or they can go horribly wrong. If they do go wrong, you’ll want to be prepared with a Windows recovery disc. Moving to a completely different motherboard and CPU can lead to driver hell, and in some cases, prevent you from booting. This happens often when you decide to transplant your primary boot drive into a new system altogether. Granted, Windows is getting better at detecting new hardware, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry!

With internal upgrades, the best way to see an immediate positive change is with an SSD. But on the outside, upgrading your display will yield an improvement you will appreciate for a long time.

I predict that 2017 will be the year of HDR (high dynamic range) displays. HDR screens display a greater range of colors, as well as brightness levels, enabling you to see more detail in an image that would otherwise appear blown or washed out. At the time of writing, HDR has only made it into high-end HDTVs, but display manufacturers are gearing up for full HDR displays. I know it’s coming, as my GTX 1080 fully supports HDR. The difference in image quality is substantial, and I can’t wait for a 4K HDR display.

I can still remember my 13-inch monochrome CRT display back in the day. Damn Damn—I I feel old.