Home and personal computers

Can you make my computer faster? Do you upgrade memory and drives?

Short answerYes, and on a machine still running a mechanical hard drive, swapping to an SSD is the single biggest improvement available. It usually makes an old computer feel new for a modest cost.

Two upgrades do almost all of the work, and knowing which one you need saves money.

  • A solid state drive, if you still have a mechanical hard drive. This is the one. A computer that takes three minutes to start, hesitates when opening anything and grinds when several things are running is almost always waiting on the drive. Replacing it with an SSD transforms the machine, and the difference is dramatic rather than marginal. If your computer is more than about six years old, or was a budget model, there is a good chance this applies.
  • More memory, if you run out of it. Helps a specific problem, which is the computer slowing down badly when you have a lot of browser tabs or several programs open at once, while being fine with one thing running. If the computer is slow even doing one thing, memory is not your problem and adding it will not help.

How to tell which you need: open Task Manager on Windows by pressing Control, Shift and Escape together, and look at the Performance tab while the computer is being slow. If the disk is at or near 100 percent, you need an SSD. If memory is nearly full, you need more of it. If both look fine and it is still slow, something else is going on, which could be malware, a failing drive, or a machine that has simply accumulated years of junk, and that is worth a proper look.

When an upgrade is not worth it. A very old machine that cannot run a supported version of Windows should be replaced rather than upgraded, because you would be spending money on something that cannot receive security updates. Some slim laptops have memory soldered to the board and cannot be upgraded at all. And if a machine has multiple problems, the repair cost approaches a replacement. We will tell you which situation you are in before you spend anything.

Advanced Computer Consulting handles these for home and personal machines, and the drive swap includes moving everything across so the computer comes back the way you left it, just quicker.