Hello again fellow readers and fixers! As the cost of living crisis continues to bite, making every penny count is more important than ever. It’s especially true when choosing how to upgrade our computers. We can keep our computers running for longer with more RAM or faster storage. We can upgrade to a newer refurbished model that is still useful for everyday tasks. Or we can just buy a shiny new computer on the never never (and add to the ocean of e-waste).
But you don’t have to spend large sums of money to give your computer a new lease of life, though! Especially on a simple SSD upgrade that does wonders for speeding up an older computer. But before you begin upgrading, double-check the specs of your computer on the manufacturer’s website. If it has any permanently fixed parts, then you can’t upgrade them yourself.
These are the three parts in computers that you can upgrade on a tight budget:
Internal storage
Here, we refer to hard drives and SSDs, the former good for data, and the latter good for the operating system. SSDs in particular, are most likely to give you the best bang for buck of all of the upgradeable parts. In fact, higher capacity SSDs are so cheap now that you really CAN have your cake and eat it too!
If you’re going for a 2.5″ SATA SSD or hard drive for your laptop, it’s worth measuring its thickness. Some laptops take only the slimmer 7.5mm drives, so if yours is 9.5mm thick, then it would not fit inside. If your laptop has only eMMC storage, then you can still connect a hard drive or SSD externally using a USB enclosure. On the other hand, many SSDs come with spacers included in the box. These spacers attach to the SSD, and hold in place with pre-applied adhesive. They allow you to install SSDs into a 9.5mm space without them becoming loose.
RAM
Random-access memory (or RAM for short) is a type of memory that holds working data as needed for a session. Then when you power off your computer, the data disappears from RAM. How much RAM your computer has affects how responsive it is overall.
It’s worth aiming for at least 8GB of RAM to give yourself some wiggle room as software grows more bloated. Many computers still use RAM modules that you can swap for faster or larger capacity models as needed. If your laptop supports more RAM than it has installed, then adding more RAM helps improve performance. If your laptop has less than 4GB of RAM, then we would recommend upgrading it.
But some laptops, especially budget devices such as Chromebooks, have fixed RAM instead. If yours has fixed RAM, then you can still try different ways to reduce the amount of RAM used. For example, you can disable animations to help make your system more responsive.
CPU
The CPU is like the brain of the computer. It handles various operations and instructions that form part of software programs. In recent years, mainboards in laptops have fixed CPUs, so you can’t directly upgrade them to newer models. To upgrade the CPU on those laptops, you would need to replace the mainboard with a compatible one that has a higher-end CPU.
While many older laptops have socketed CPUs that you can upgrade, it’s unlikely that you’ll get much improvement. The process of upgrading the CPU itself is fairly awkward. That’s because you need to remove screws holding the arms in position. These arms help keep the heatsink firmly in contact with the CPU to draw heat away from it. Then, once you swapped the CPU, you need to apply fresh thermal compound and re-apply the screws to the arms.
In summary…
And those are the parts that bring the most tangible performance benefits in laptops! Of the three, we would recommend performing an SSD and possibly a RAM upgrade. These upgrades are easy to perform, and bring immediate performance benefits to an older laptop. While upgrading the CPU can help improve performance, the awkward and time-consuming process means it’s probably not worth trying yourself. So remember, just keep calm and carry on fixing – and upgrading of course!