What Components in My PC Are Upgradeable?
If you have browsed this book's Table of Contents, then you already have an idea which
components in your PC are upgradable. If you haven't taken a quick look over the TOC, then
you may be surprised to learn that almost every component in your PC, including the processor,
memory, video card, disk drives, and more, are candidates to be upgraded.
Which components you decide to upgrade often will be determined by how you use your PC, but
not always. Some upgrades make sense to perform simply because the price of the particular
component is too good to pass up. In the last two years, the price of memory and hard disk drives
have dropped dramatically. I regularly see 32MB of memory priced under $100 and 3GB or more
hard disk drives for around $200.
Upgrading Your Memory (RAM)
Your PC's memory typically is one of the easiest and least expensive components to upgrade
(see Figure 1.1). Upgrading your PC's memory also has the added advantage of improving its
performance. Sometimes the improvement in performance is large and other times the
improvement is small, but there is always an increase of some type in performance.
New Term:RAM and memory are often used interchangeably. RAM is short for Random Access
Memory and is the electronic memory (chips) that your computer uses for running programs
and storing temporary data. RAM is not the permanent storage area for files.