My PC is about 4 years old and has always performed well. I take the time to make sure it is free of viruses and spyware, clean out all the temp and caching directories, rebuild the paging file occasionally and have invested in a 3rd party defragmentation program (PerfectDisk 8.0) that really seemed to improve disk access speeds. My point is that the machine was probably running as well as I could expect it to and I was very satisfied with it.
A few weeks ago I noticed that I only had 512MB or memory in it. For some reason I always thought I had ordered it with 1GB and never really thought about it any further. I usually have a lot of stuff running in the background so I spent about 70 bucks and bought another GB of memory. I figured it would help during some of the peak usage times.
All I can say is "Holy Cow!" The difference in the machine is phenominal. Although it always ran well, the difference in it now is like night and day. The network runs faster, it boots up and loads faster, I network to other machines as well as a TiVo box and it isn't bogging down with high network activity.
So my point is if you're running XP or higher and have less than a gig of memory it seems to be well worth spending the bucks for an upgrade. Memory is cheap and the extra memory will give your machine one hell of a shot in the arm.
If only it were as easy to upgrade my brain!
