Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Thomas: I have a little cash to spend to upgrade my desktop computer and I need your advice on how best to spend it.
Right now it has 16GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive (which is close to being full).
My question is should I use the money to max out the RAM on this machine by adding another 16GB or would I be better off replacing the hard drive with a 1TB SSD? [Read more…]
Question from Chris: My family has two laptops and a desktop computer, all of which need more RAM. How can I find out which type of RAM to buy for each computer?
I checked online and there’s DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4, DIMMs, SODIMMS, etc. and they all seem to operate at different speeds. It’s all so confusing!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Larry: I read your post explaining the advantages of installing an SSD a while back and I’ve wanted one ever since to go in my HP desktop PC.
I ended up buying a 120GB SSD (I got it for $20!) and installed it as the boot drive in my HP desktop computer. I left the 750GB hard drive in there for extra storage.
I installed Windows 10 from scratch on the SSD and now I’m ready to install my programs. The thing is with only 120GB of space on the SSD it won’t hold anywhere near all of my programs.
I have a couple of questions for you:
1 – Which programs should I install on the SSD and which ones should I leave on the hard drive?
2 – Should I leave the original Windows 10 files on the hard drive or is it safe to delete them to free up that space?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Every week I receive hundreds of questions for the Tech Q&A section of my blog, and one question I get asked on a regular basis is “What’s the best upgrade I can make to speed up my computer?”
In times past my answer was always the same: Add more RAM
But I’m afraid that’s no longer true in most situations…
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
There comes a time when every computer owner realizes that their current computer just isn’t up to the task of working with the latest hardware and software.
When we reach that conclusion we must inevitably make a choice between upgrading and buying a new computer.
In my opinion there are only five possible upgrades that really make sense given the historically low prices of new computers these days: [Read more…]