Best upgrade choice within US$100

[qupy]

Advanced CPU, VGA, memory or Mob always cost a fortune but do they really provide equal value to their price? Especially now, the price of RAM gets higher and higher.. How about SSD? I think it should be the best C/P solution for upgrading the old system. You will not have much compatibility problem when using it and it can easily accerate boot, game, page and file reading time. Most people think it is too expensive but that is not correct since SSD is not to replace HDD but to enhance it. To use a small SSD as a system disk and HDD as storage will have dramatic change to system performance. Such as Intel/Kingston/OCZ all have launched small SSD with low price about US$100. With that price, SSD can do much more in improving performance than other components.

[Krow]

Under $100, you will get 30GB SSD's which are not enough if you want to run more than one OS.

What is the purpose of this thread? If you want to upgrade, then post your current config. If it is merely general discussion, then I would go for 1.5TB Internal drives.

[qupy]

Sorry, I just want to discuss what kind of upgrade can have better outcome. Since now the RAM become more and more expensive and other components like CPU, GPU are also hard to have good one below $100, SSD sould be an thinkable option.

Actually, I also found some people in other forum have took small SSD as their C drive and get better performance in daily operating. 3~40GB may be little tight to put in all the applications but I think it's OK to load in OS and few necessary apps. 1.5TB HDD may helpful to install more data but it won't help to speed up your boot, file opening and file searching.

[Krow]

I boot from a 4 year old 160GB Hitachi drive. I have three OSes installed and none of them boots slowly. Windows boots within a minute maximum, often less than 45 seconds. For faster bootups, better remove startup entries and clean your system using a utility like CCleaner. I have only on startup entry, i.e., Antivirus.

For a $100 budget, I would rather buy a backup drive as it is much more useful. Even if I do buy an SSD, what will it do? Boot my PC in less than 20 seconds? I can wait 20 seconds more and boot with a normal drive. The fact is that SSD's are still not mainstream and make a very bad value for money.

Thinking of $100, I think I would buy a Sansa Clip+ PMP and Soundmagic PL-21 IEM's. Would be awesome value for money.