The best computer upgrade I've ever done was:

Surely "Graphics Card", an important system component for many gamers (a fair few of whom browse this fine site) would be an upgrade worthy of consideration...?

Of course... :-)

...laura

It's the only purchase that can in any way be considered and investment, since if you get a really nice one now, you can probably use it for years across multiple computers.

Around 1988 I bought a Nec Multisync 5D 21" CRT display for myself at work. It cost me $2400, but it was worth every penny as at the time everyone else was using 12" displays at 640x480 (or worse), and that monitor still works fine today (though its maximum resolution of around 1100x700 means it no longer sees active use).

I credit this display for eliminating ten years or so of eyestrain and discomfort, as well as productivity gains, and I wonder if it's one of the reasons my eyesight is still good many years later.

So spend the extra bucks on a 27" or 30" professional display and you won't regret it.

It's always worth spending more on interfaces between you and the rest of the world. That goes for monitors, mice, keyboards, as well as things like mattresses).

G.

I do IT work... the best replacement to Date: User Replacement.

The switch from a single headed system to a 2 monitor setup was the single best improvment I've ever done.

At work I now have a 4 monitor setup. E-Mail is always open on 1, various Notepad notes and IM converstations on another, and the other 2 for whatever I'm doing.

... resulted from adjusting the nut behind the keyboard.

A couple of years ago I replaced my clunky, 5 year old, self-built Pentium 4 mini-tower with a MacBook Pro.

Portable, way more powerful, and a better OS. Plus, the ability to boot into Windows if I needed it. It was life changing, not being tied to my desk.

Actually getting a laptop that emphasized battery life was probably the best thing I've ever done. Not actually being tethered to an outlet to do work is great. I didn't realize how big a hindrance it was to have laptop that couldn't last a day on a single charge while doing basic tasks.

By biggest upgrade was going from a P4 Prescott gaming rig to an i7 940 based one with two 10krpm drives in RAID0 and two video cards in SLI. But that's because the P4 blew caps and died, and I couldn't find any compatible mobos that would work with the existing parts, and most used ones had also blown caps and died at that time, leaving me too poor to overhaul my gaming PC for many years.

But for a single component, it would have to be hard drive/SSD. Storage has always been a computer's biggest bottleneck.

Three years I stopped playing WoW, and at that point I was also finished with Windoze B.S. I was tired of the crashing and instability. Plus the constant video upgrades required to play games. I was done with games, too.

I kicked it to the curb and bought a Mac Mini. 1,000,000% improvement to the overall happiness of my life.

Linux at work, Mac OSX at home. No Windows anywhere. Sheer bliss.

2K cache memory for the PDP-11/34a -- it made a *huge* difference!

This is a very hard choice, since it all depends on where your bottleneck is. I've done three different upgrades that have had a drastic effect on my, as the buzzwordy types would say, "experience":

- I upgraded my 20" (1280x1024) IBM CRT monitor to an Apple LCD (1680x1050) back in 2005. The difference was amazing.
- I upgraded my Linux gaming box (yes, you read that right) from 1GB RAM to 4GB RAM a few years back. Everything suddenly ran significantly smoother
- Not an upgrade, but I coughed up the extra dough to get an SSD for the Thinkpad I bought this summer. Stunning difference compared to spinning disks. I hardly have time to blink between the GRUB menu and login screen.

It's all about the bottlenecks...

Without a doubt, the most notable increase in performance for me was installing an SSD. I replaced a ultra 320 15k scsi drive with an early model intel SSD and it was night and day. I have since upgraded again to a 128gb model crucial m4 and I am LOVING it!!

0ms access time, 400MB/s read 250MB/s write (with SATA3). The system is simply snappier and more responsive. I have never had a CPU uprgade, or anything else, make as much of a difference.

Upgrading laptops we had at work with crucial m4's recently has breathed life into 4 or 5 year old machines which people constantly complained were slow. With the 64GB version at about $110, its really the best "bang for your buck" that you can do.

I can't believe OS wasn't an option. Switching OSes was by far the best thing I have ever done in terms of increasing the overall satisfaction I had with my computer.

If this is strictly a hardware question though I'd have to go with SSD.

I went from a Mac IIci (albeit with an 68040 accellerator board) to a G3, i.e. 8 years and about 4 generations in one go. That's a noticeable increase in performance.

At different times I've done each of those upgrades, and each time it was "the best" upgrade I could do.

I'm going to have to go with input device, my Logitech Trackman wheel. I bought its predecessor originally for $100 back in the early 90's and have made sure I have one on every computer I use since.

But every time I upgrade some component it seems like a great thing. Going from monochrome to color monitors was fantastic. Then from a 15" to a 21" to dual 21" monitors was great. I like the extra screen real-estate and desk space with my current dual 24" flat panels, but I still think the dual Eizo CRT's looked better.

Going from a crappy VGA to a Matrox Millennium was a phenomenal improvement for 2D. Adding a Voodoo FX card took Quake and Hexen to a whole new level. Obviously every new card since has been a step up, but nothing as extreme as what those two cards were.

Having a system running on 4 Megs of RAM and going to 16 and then 32 megs was insanely noticeable. But these days unless you have a seriously under built machine, RAM doesn't have quite the same impact.

I noticed a big difference between my old 5400 HD and the Micropolis 7,200 RPM SCSI drives I upgraded to. Also a difference in decibels. When I went from 15,000 RPM SCSI to SSD, I noticed a difference, but not the golly gee wiz I was expecting.

I've had gigabit copper in my house for over a decade, so my memory has kind of faded about the jump from 10 to 100 to gig. But I never tried moving 5 GB files around on those very often either.

What about print quality and speed going from dot matrix and daisy wheel printers to modern laser printers. It's funny how we've long surpassed "photo realistic" ink jet printing. That seemed to be the big marketing buzz in the mid to late 90's. Scanner speeds have gotten dramatically better too.

Probably my second favorite upgrade is between dial-up and broad band internet. Frankly that dwarfs just about everything else.

In 2000, I stopped using Windows as my main desktop and switched to Red Hat Linux (and later Fedora for a brief while). Then in late 2003 I switched from Linux to OS X on the desktop. In terms of getting my work done, both of these steps were improvements on what I was doing previously.

Note that Linux is still my server OS of choice, and likely always will be.

+++Out Of Cheese Error ???????+++

  Redo from Start

...and replacing it with a new, faster NEC-V20 microprocessor. I don't know if I actually got more speed and power, but I was tickled to death with myself for doing the transplant.

As an upgrade strategy, it seemed like the logical thing to do at the time. Of course, my addiction won out. I now have portables and pads with no cure in sight.

Rural power grid tends to mean brownouts on a regular basis. Now I just laugh at them.

Inserting 36 dual-inline-package ram chips into my motherboard. Then doing it all over again after I installed all them upside down by mistake. It was a 386/20 I wish I could remember the company.

Hardest Upgrade: Putting RAM in a Mac Mini. Now THAT was hard. I cannot -believe- how hard that was. It was documented to be a two person job.

the one I just did.

Back in 1998 I bought my first OEM system:

P2 400
128MB of RAM
8GB HDD
DVD ROM

Which was a huge boost from my parents 486DX4 (AMD Overdrive) with its amazing 24MB of RAM and 500MB of disk space.

The next biggest jump was in 2009, when I went from a:

Shuttle SN25P (nForce4)
2GB DDR SDRAM
Athlon64 3200+
250GB HDD
MSI GeForce 6800GT 512MB GDDR2

to

ASUS P6T Deluxe V2
12GB DDR3 SDRAM
Intel Core i7 920
150GB 10K RPM Boot Drive + 2TB RAID0
Sapphire 4870 1GB GDDR3

Since then I upgraded some small bits:

Crucial M4 256GB SSD (still have the 10K RPM drive)
MSI TwinFrozr II Radeon 6950 2GB GDDR5

I am still using the Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW that I bought back in 2005. If anything, I will get an additional monitor to go alongside it.

The two minor upgrades have not granted anywhere near the performance bump that the entire system replacement has. Videos that stuttered on the A64 with 100% cpu utilization don't even register on my CPU, and 12GB of RAM means I basically never hit the pagefile.

That said, if you've got a Core 2 Quad or so right now, best bets for upgrades are RAM, then SSD.

1996 era IBM Model M keyboard. Replaced the membrane crap that I had prior. Best typing experience you'll ever have, and if someone breaks into your house, you can use it as a blunt instrument to defend yourself. (then type out the report for the police dept).

IBM-1130 -> IBM-3033

Tie for most noticeable upgrades:

1. 2400 baud modem to 14.4k baud modem. The BBS text just flew!

2. 56k modem to a cable modem. Can't remember the bandwidth on the cable account, but it was a couple order of magnitudes faster than the modem.

3. Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. Not having to run Trumpet Winsock any more = ZOMG THANK YOU.

my laptop was dead and unused until i swapped the hard disk and put a nix distro on it. now i use it all the time, as i'm forced to learn bash.

A really good slide rule.

... a complete system replacement will be best, it shouldn't really be a poll option.

However, as far as upgrades go, RAM usually gives best bang for buck. If in doubt, drop 1-2 grades on CPU and double your RAM with the money (which is generally aroudn the same cost, on typical consumer levels of hardware). You won't regret it.