Top 10 Computer Upgrade Ideas

Are your office desktops showing their age? Are users seeing the hourglass more than the cursor? It's time to consider a PC makeover -- hardware and software steps that can extend a computer's lifespan while increasing its user's satisfaction. Here are a double handful, ranging from affordable (even free) to substantial.

Good housekeeping: One thing you can bet money on is that PC performance doesn't improve with time -- it slows down. Perhaps the most obvious drag on a well-used computer is hard drive fragmentation, which can turn speedy data reads and program launches into disk-thrashing delays unless you regularly run a defragger. Whether it's the basic utility built into Windows or a sophisticated fragmentation prevention tool like Diskeeper, there needs to be one in your toolkit.

Ditto for more general PC tune-up and Windows Registry cleaners. I like Iolo's all-in-one System Mechanic, but there are inexpensive or free alternatives for specific functions such as WinPatrol for catching programs that try to add themselves to system startup and CCleaner for clearing digital underbrush and tidying the Registry.

A new OS: Suggesting this for Vista would have been, uh, controversial, but Windows 7 is an operating system upgrade worth considering, both for its own relatively perky performance and for the time that features like the new Taskbar can save busy multitaskers. (And if yours is a Mac shop, you're running Snow Leopard by now. Right?)

A new office suite: Yes, blame Redmond for putting you over a barrel, but if your employees are still using Microsoft Office 2003 (or, for that matter, 2000), they're losing productivity every time somebody sends them a file in Office 2007's .DOCX or other newfangled format. I happen to like Office 2007's "ribbon" interface, but if you prefer the comfortable classic look, the free office suite OpenOffice.org keeps getting better and better: This month's version 3.2 upgrade both improved its Office 2007 compatibility and shortened what even its fans admitted was a somewhat pokey start time.

A new desk set: Do you have any idea how full of dust, crumbs, and crud your users' keyboards are? Treat them to a new keyboard and mouse -- at worst they'll feel appreciated, and at best they'll see genuine ergonomic benefits.

A new graphics card: Your employees don't need to play the latest DirectX 11 games, but if they do any kind of content creation -- working with Adobe Photoshop, for instance, or encoding videos for the Web -- they can benefit from better-than-integrated graphics available for well under $100 a pop. AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5570 (about $85) is a low-profile card suitable for even small-form-factor desktops.

A new monitor: This is an obvious smart move if you still have CRTs in the cubicles -- the energy savings and larger viewable area of today's LCD monitors make them a win-win for management and workers alike. Start shopping at 20 inches and head up from there; it's easy to find a 24-inch display for under $250.

New monitors, plural: Want to make an employee feel like an absolute Master of the Universe, no matter how humble his PC? Give him a second monitor. He'll be so happy arranging application windows he may not notice his productivity rising by 10 to as much as 50 percent. And you won't even have to give him a new graphics card if you take advantage of handy USB display adapters from firms like Tritton Technologies and NewerTech.

A memory upgrade: No matter which operating system you're running, adding memory remains the simplest, most cost-effective way to boost PC performance. If a machine has one or more memory slots free, add more of the same type and speed of DRAM (buying anything faster is a waste of money, since system memory runs at the speed of its slowest stick) to max it out, or at least to reach 3GB for a 32-bit OS or 4GB for a 64-bit. If the sockets are all occupied, consider replacing the existing modules with higher-capacity ones. Memory vendors like Crucial and Kingston offer online compatibility guides to help you buy the right RAM for a particular system.

RAID: Mass storage is so cheap nowadays that I won't tell you to buy a new hard drive. I'll tell you to buy a pair and configure them as a RAID 1 array for real-time backup and the best insurance against drive failure. Plug-and-play RAID arrays are plentiful in the form of USB or eSATA external dual-drive units such as Western Digital's My Book Mirror Edition or LaCie's 2big Quadra.

Solid-state storage: There's one hard disk option pricey enough that I'll agree to buying just one instead of two: a solid-state drive (SSD). As little as 32GB or 64GB should suffice for a boot drive that'll perk up a desktop by loading your operating system and office suite in record time; 100GB and 200GB models are expensive, but increasingly tempting. As a bonus, you never need to defrag an SSD (and actually shouldn't; it can shorten the drive's lifespan).

Three or more of the above: Pricewise, there's a fine line where upgrade turns into replacement. I'd say more, but HardwareCentral's already listed ten reasons to deploy all-new PCs.