The Lowdown on Upgrades

Is your aging PC worth saving, or should you put the money toward a racy new model? Check out our superguide full of tips on how to bring your computer into the present.

Thanks for the Memory

Upgrading your RAM won't deliver the dramatic performance improvement you can get with a processor upgrade, but you'll notice a difference, especially if you work with more than one application at a time. The upgrade itself--popping one or more memory modules into sockets on your motherboard--is easy; the challenge is making sure you get the right modules for your PC. Consult your system manual or the PC maker's Web site for help, or buy your RAM from a memory vendor whose Web site lets you look up the proper upgrade for a particular system, such as Crucial or Kingston. Bear in mind that you may need to add memory modules in pairs. (See July's Hardware Tips for additional advice on choosing RAM.)

We upgraded a Hewlett-Packard Vectra VL 5 Series 5 PC--a circa-1996 machine powered by a Pentium-166 (non-MMX) CPU--from 16MB of RAM to 64MB. The job cost around $100, took just 10 minutes, and boosted the system's PC WorldBench score from 78 to 90--a 15 percent increase. Although that's not a huge improvement (the new score is still less than half of what you'd get from a typical new system on our Top 10 Budget PCs chart), it's worth the modest cost and hassle--especially if you regularly toggle between applications, wrangle large spreadsheets or graphics files, or do other memory-intensive tasks.

If 64MB of RAM is good, then 128MB is even better, right? Not necessarily. With our HP Vectra system, we actually saw a performance decrease when we upgraded to 128MB--and if you're running a PC with Intel's old 430FX, 430HX, 430VX, or 430TX chip set, so will you. These chip sets have a memory-caching limitation that can degrade performance if memory is increased beyond 64MB. Newer system chip sets and motherboards that use non-Intel chip sets don't have this problem. But even then, the performance gain over 64MB is usually small.

If you're mulling over an upgrade to Windows 2000, though, you might want 128MB of RAM. We haven't done performance testing on the new operating system yet, but its memory management is superior to that of Windows 95 and 98, and may take better advantage of amounts over 64MB (assuming the PC doesn't use one of the chip sets mentioned earlier). However, a RAM upgrade alone is unlikely to bring your old system up to Win 2000 specs--you'll probably want at least a Pentium IIclass PC, and the older your current system, the greater the chances that its motherboard, video card, or other components won't be fully compatible with the new OS. The bottom line: If you plan to adopt Windows 2000 in the near future, and your computer would need massive upgrading to run it, your smartest move might be to simply buy a new PC with Windows 2000 preinstalled.