Upgrading Your Computer: A Guide on What Parts You Should Upgrade First

A desktop computer’s lifespan usually runs around 5 – 6 years, so once you reach this pinnacle and go beyond, your PC will start running slow. After countless optimizations and removing all unnecessary files and your PC is still running slow, maybe it’s time to upgrade some hardware. But, which parts or components should you upgrade first?

Although you can tailor your upgrades to suit a particular need, in general, performance must always take priority. And so, based on performance, you should upgrade in this order.

RAM

Adding more memory is the easiest PC upgrade you can make. It’s affordable and it can be done on almost any PC including many laptops. Upgrading the RAM delivers an instant performance to almost all PCs that are running slow. For resource hungry tasks such as video editing or gaming, the more RAM your computer has, the better. Even for casual use, extra RAM will enable you to have more apps running in the background and keep a greater number of tabs open in your web browser. How much RAM is needed? 4 GB is currently the baseline amount, but you’ll notice a significant improvement if you upgrade to 8 GB. For heavier tasks, you should look to 16 GB for best results.

Graphics Card

If you’re a serious gamer or do heavy work like video or image editing, then this should be an upgrade together with the RAM. This also includes work in gaming programming, 3D modeling, and 3D animation. Otherwise, you can upgrade just to improve the quality of watching videos. PC manufacturers tend to go with integrated graphics cards rather than dedicated graphics cards. If you have an integrated card, then moving up to a dedicated one will work wonders.

Hard Drive

There are usually two reasons to upgrade your hard drive. Either you’re running out of space or you want faster performance. If you’ve done everything you can to free up your hard disk storage and still regularly run out of space, then you will need to swap it out for a larger one. Not only does a full hard drive make it impossible to save new data, but it can also impact performance. At the very least, try to keep 10 GB of free space for the operating system to use. A quick option is to switch to a solid state drive. These use flash memory instead of a spinning disk and are many times faster than a typical hard disk drive, and are reliable since they last much longer than ordinary drives.

Processor

A processor is only worth upgrading if the upgrade is really important and much needed. But it’s expensive and may require you to upgrade your motherboard and it may require you to buy a new RAM. Even if your motherboard is compatible with a new processor on paper, it may need a BIOS update to work, so check before you buy. Ultimately, if your processor is the speed bottleneck in your system, you might want to consider buying a whole new PC altogether.

Track Your Data Usage Easily With the Help of These Great Android Apps

If you're looking for ways on how to maximize usage out of your mobile data plan, you need to closely monitor your data usage. Although Android has a built-in data tracker, there are times when it doesn't suffice to your needs. Luckily, there are apps that can offer more than what Android's built-in data tracker can do.

GlassWire

GlassWire is a great solution if real-time tracking is important to you. By default, GlassWire will show a live graph depicting the data usage over the last minute. The “Alerts” section will warn you when an app initiates a data connection for the first time, so you can keep an eye on mischievous data eaters. GlassWire also adds information to the notification bar, detailing the data usage over that month as well as a very useful bandwidth monitor for real-time tracking.

Data Usage Monitor

Data Usage Monitor is a very basic app that’s best used for tracking how close you are to your usage limits. The graph on the main page shows you a rough trajectory of your current usage as well as an estimate on when you’ll reach your limit. The apps page brings up all the apps you’ve used when you hit the refresh button so you can see who the main offenders are. There’s a second app this developer has created that can monitor Internet speeds, making for a nice combination of apps.

3G Watchdog

3G Watchdog does a lot more than track 3G connections. It can also track 4G and Wi-Fi data usage. Featured within the app is a real-time graph to see how your data is being used by apps as it happens. You can set up a plan and let 3G Watchdog report on how far through your plan you are. It even puts a small icon in the notifications tray that lets you know how much data you’ve used so far.

My Data Manager

Once installed, My Data Manager will keep track of all the data you use. It nicely separates it into Mobile and Wi-Fi traffic, so your Netflix-watching back home doesn’t skew the data.

You can see how much data each app used that day on the main screen, or scroll through the Apps menu to see a day-by-day history of how each app is doing. There’s even a map feature that pinpoints where you were when you used your mobile data. My Data Manager also places a status bar in the notifications area so you can track usage as it happens, but this can be turned off if you find it annoying.

Internet Speed Meter Lite

Internet Speed Meter Lite is the perfect choice for people who don’t want to be inundated with features. There are no graphs, charts, or even app-by-app data logs. What makes this app very useful, however, is the live bandwidth notification in the top left. This allows for real-time monitoring of how much data an app is using while you use it. You can also tell the app to stop tracking traffic and shut itself down, which is a surprisingly absent feature in many data usage monitors.