Anyone who says performance doesn't matter hasn't tried erasing a power line from a vacation photo or squeezing a CD into MP3 files. As our skills and expectations of what we can do with our PCs rise, we tackle more complex tasks that take more processing power-and more time. Life remains short, so computer speed is important.
If your goal is to get the greatest performance possible out of your system, perhaps the best strategy-and the one most employed-is to replace your old computer with the fastest model you can find. But if you don't have the budget, or if you've recently replaced your PC, we know some tricks that can give you the speed boost you are looking for. Some tips take just a few moments (at least to get them started). Some are a bit more involved or come at an expense. Others are full hardware upgrades of, say, memory or hard drives. We'll give you the lowdown on such upgrades, walk you through the steps, and unveil some interesting discoveries we've made through PC Magazine Labs' testing.
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