Let’s face it, buying a new computer every eighteen months isn’t in everyone’s budget. But as time passes and one doesn’t upgrade their computer, the older, smaller size of everything internal becomes a limiting factor. Hardware upgrades can land you an additional year or two of suitable performance, at a fraction of the cost of a computer replacement. Let’s take a look at two important parts to upgrade.

• System Memory: As time ticks by, programs, files, and virtually anything you’ll be downloading become larger and more memory intensive files to operate. As a result, with the same memory that you had in place when you bought your computer, you’ll notice appreciable slowing of your machine over time. Upgrading memory to the maximum that your computer will support is a good idea. This allows faster access to files of all types. It also permits far smoother multitasking, which is useful for anyone who requires multiple programs to run simultaneously as they do their computing. That, of course, is not some specialized niche. Virtually everyone has several programs open at a time as they maneuver through their computing experience.

• Hard Drive: Those larger files naturally take up more space. Not only that, but they take longer to access with the same technical specs from the past. Newer, larger hard drives not only offer far more storage capacity, they also offer faster access to system files, movies, and all other media. Not only can you suddenly store far more data, it’ll be accessed faster as well.

The best news about both upgrades is that they’ll cost far less now that when your machine was new. Thrifty enhancement!