With so many offerings in the market today, it’s hard for businesspeople to decide which computer to buy or whether it’s time to upgrade their computers. The truth is that even the worst computer sold nowadays is powerful enough for running basic applications such as browsing, e-mail and an office suite. Therefore, why should a business user spend money to replace or improve old computers?

It only makes sense to spend money on more powerful computers if they will really increase productivity. For example, in the typical office environment it makes no sense to buy computers with discrete video cards–motherboards with integrated video will do the trick for less money.

Processing power, on the other hand, is an area where there is no answer set in stone. Any CPU available today is fast enough to run office-style applications. However, if a work PC feels slower than the computer that the employee has at home, he or she will complain that his or her office computer is “slow”, even though the machine is adequate to perform the job it is supposed to do. Also, in some companies the decision of which computers to buy is up to the IT department, and the professional behind the decision may choose more powerful machines for the very same reason (i.e., not because they are really needed, but because he or she thinks that anything less powerful than what he or she has at home is “slow”). Of course the situation is completely different when users really need more processing power and more CPU cores for tasks such asvideo editing and 3D rendering.

But there are some upgrades that are way more cost-effective than getting a faster CPU. The most obvious one is adding more RAM. In fact, upgrading a PC’s RAM will improve speed more than changing the CPU to the next speed bump within the same series (for instance, upgrading from a Core 2 Duo E7500 that runs at 2.93 GHz to a Core 2 Duo E7600 that runs at 3.06 GHz) and will cost you less.

With more RAM, more programs and files can be opened at the same time without the computer having to resort to a technique called virtual memory (also known as the swap file), in which the operating system starts to dump the contents of RAM to a file in the hard disk drive to free up memory. Whenever the computer needs to access data that is in the swap file it has to load it back to RAM and dump what is in the RAM at the moment into the swap file. This swapping is easily noticed by users in the form of slower performance. And adding more RAM reduces the probability of the computer having to access the swap file.

For many users, another effective upgrade is adding a second display. With two monitors, users can have different programs opened at the same on different screens, so they don’t have to juggle windows by frequently minimizing and maximizing them. The prices of LCD monitors have dropped so much in recent years that it’s a very cost-effective upgrade.

(Gabriel Torres is the editor-in-chief of Hardware Secrets, a US-based website about PC hardware.)