Upgrading IT OR nuke IT

Are you torn between up grading and buying a new PC?, how to make the decision, figuring out whether to upgrade your current PC or buy a new one isn’t easy, If you’ve gal an older system with an AGP slot , is it worth upgrading the graphics card? Or should you, nuke it. The best way to approach t he upgrade-versus- buy decision is with a classic cost-benefit analysis. No, you don’t need a spreadsheet; a few rules of thumb will suffice

ASK YOURSELF WHAT YOU PLAN TO DO WITH THE SYSTEM.
It the system is a gaming box, then upgrading an older AGP-based system to a new graphics card will not help, since many modern games make heavy use of the CPU. On the other hand, if that old box is something you plan on handing off to someone in your family to run Web apps. You might be able to get away with leaving the current graphics card, just adding a little inexpensive memory to make the PC a bit more responsive.

ALWAYS CONSIDER THE HIDDEN COSTS WITHIN
AN UPGRADE, at first, you may think you need to upgrade only one component, with a gaming box, for example, you might consider a new video card. So you add that-but then you discover that you re ally need to upgrade the memory from 512MB to 1GB or more. Oh, and some games take up more than 10 gigabytes of drive space. So let’s add some mo re drive space.

By the time you’re done. You’ve sun hundred s of dollars into a dead-end system. If price is the main factor in you, decision to upgrade and not rep lace your system, do the math and see if the total amount of the upgrade s costs more than a whole new Pc. A new motherboard, memory, midrange processor, and decent GPU will cost you about $600-and probably less, toss in another $100 for, a big hard drive, and you’re set for several years.

NEVER EVER BUY OLD COMPONENTS THAT COST MORE THAN NEW ONES.
When old components start to cost more than the equivalent new ones, it’s a sign that the availability of those particular components is getting tight. At this point, it will more than likely be cheaper to buy a new system.
Take RDRAM, for example. There are actually still quite a few systems that use RDRAM. A 512MB RDRAM module will cost you more than $150, you ca n get 2GB DDR2 memory kits for under $100. Heck, eve n DDR3 is cheaper.