breathe new life into your PC.

Today I would like to share some quick tips on hardware upgrades for your PC

My PC runs like Molasses: How can I speed it up?

Remember when your PC was a few hours old? It booted up like greased lightening and was generally chipper when loading and running your applications; everything just seemed perfect. As time moves on you may notice that your PC isn't running like it used to run; it has a lethargic, snail-like feel when running applications, and the time it takes to boot up into a usable state just keeps increasing. What's going on here?

As you install more and more applications, filling up every corner of your hard drive, subtle and invisible changes may occur inside your XP system. You may not even realize it, but a lot of applications install little hidden services that ride in from disk at boot time, residing in vital memory, hogging essential resources, and increasing the time it takes for XP to boot up. These services--a lot of them being nonessential--can range from services that check for updates for a certain application to obnoxious spyware.

To put the much needed spring back into your PC's step, your computer may be in need of more elbow room--RAM--and a few software tweaks that'll get your PC running like a champ again. There're multitudes of settings you can adjust and software tweaks that you can apply; let's get started with a popular hardware performance boost that's sure to pep up your PC.

Increasing your PC's workspace Real Estate

You wouldn't work on your desktop PC in the backseat of your car, would you? Aside from being terribly uncomfortable, you wouldn't have enough elbow room to work efficiently, performing a cumbersome balancing act between your keyboard and mouse and the rest of your peripherals. For the same reason, the less "workspace" your PC has to manage its data with, the more

inefficient and sluggish it will seem.

Your PC's workspace is its RAM--random access memory. Simply put, the more memory your PC has to work with, the quicker it'll seem to operate. When your PC is taxed for memory space, it must perform a complex juggling act, constantly swapping data back and forth from RAM and the slower hard drive; this is when computing operations begin to lag.

Give your computer more "work space" by increasing its amount of RAM. Before you run out and get more memory, you'll need to check your motherboard's specs to find out what type of RAM it requires. PC32000 DDR SDRAM is a popular type along with the quicker DDR2 variety. PC's of yesteryear may still use the considerably slower PC100 or PC133 memory. If you're running XP and have less than 512 megabytes of memory, an upgrade to 1 gig will certainly improve your system's overall performance.

If you are confused about what type of memory your PC - my favorite is try out the memory scanner by Crucial Technology. Their online test http://www.crucial.com/ will scan your desktop or even your laptop PC and determine what memory you can upgrade too. Plus you can purchase from them direct or the same type of memory elsewhere

Installing memory on your PC is a lot easier than you think - and can be done typically in five minutes or less to give your PC a real boost.