Upgrading a Computer, Part 1
The first question is, I guess, should you upgrade. If you look earlier in these posts, you will see ways to improve the performance of your computer which don’t cost anything except some time. (see Old Age or Clogged Arteries?)
So, should you upgrade? Well if you have a burning desire to spend money you could go out and buy a high specification computer and then cripple it with Windows Vista. Look to spending well over a thousand dollars to get something that will probably run about the speed of your current Windows XP machine. 
You could also buy (for even more hard-earned cash) a very high end machine that should (maybe) outperform your current computer. It will have a very large hard disk, a video card with a lot of memory on it and a massive amount of RAM. Once you’ve got that lovely new machine that comes with Windows Vista, you can follow the advice on Coding Sanity http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx and upgrade to the new improved version of Windows.
But seriously, the first thing to do before any upgrade is to ask yourself – ‘Why am I doing this?’
There are reasons to upgrade. You may be constantly running out of disk space with your multimedia documents or the video downloads you want. You might be a game player and want something that can run the latest version effectively – nothing kills a game mood quicker than having to wait between screen changes.
The best thing to do is open a document or get out pen and paper and make a list of reasons why you want new hardware. Then do some research at online vendors to see how much things cost.
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