Strongly seconding the SSD recomendation. I can’t think of anything else that’s given so much enjoyment for the money. A SSD dramatically increases perceived performance of a computer beyond what you’d expect from benchmarks. Adding extra ram can hide the latency of a mechanical HD by caching, but it does nothing for worst case performance, and worst case performance is highly salient. I’d much rather use a low spec PC with a SSD than a high spec PC with a mechanical HD. Predictably mediocre performance feels faster than high average performance with high variance.
A SSD dramatically increases perceived performance of a computer beyond what you’d expect from benchmarks.
That really depends on what you are running. In the general case, if you get a LOT of performance increase from an SSD, this generally means your disk cache is way too small and you should start by buying more RAM.
Strongly seconding the SSD recomendation. I can’t think of anything else that’s given so much enjoyment for the money. A SSD dramatically increases perceived performance of a computer beyond what you’d expect from benchmarks. Adding extra ram can hide the latency of a mechanical HD by caching, but it does nothing for worst case performance, and worst case performance is highly salient. I’d much rather use a low spec PC with a SSD than a high spec PC with a mechanical HD. Predictably mediocre performance feels faster than high average performance with high variance.
That really depends on what you are running. In the general case, if you get a LOT of performance increase from an SSD, this generally means your disk cache is way too small and you should start by buying more RAM.
Not losing data when the computer is dropped or mishandled is an important performance feature if you’re clumsy.