You should also consider how much technical support you need and the value of your time. Each upgrade takes anywhere from 15 minutes to 1 hour, and you may have to spend even more time troubleshooting the new part. There is satisfaction to be gained from doing the job yourself, and you will learn a lot in the process, but it will cost you. We then ran our suite of benchmark tests on several upgrade combinations, comparing the results with the original system and evaluating the time and money spent for each upgrade. We also compared these upgrades with the price and performance of three new systems, one each from Compaq, IBM, and Gateway, to see when it makes sense to upgrade and when it makes sense to buy a new system.
Some upgrades have nothing to do with quantifiable performance.
You may be looking for better viewing quality from your monitor, a bigger monitor, or a larger hard disk. Or you may want a DVD-ROM drive so that you can enjoy the latest games, movie, and edutainment. We relied on the ZD Winstone benchmark test suite to gauge general performance on business applications and used the WinBench 99 tests to look at gains in specific subsystems. In addition, we used the new CPUmark 99 test to evaluate CPU and memory subsystem performance. We then tested the performance with certain upgrade components installed both separately and in combination.