I’ve been pretty much upgrading my own desktop PC regularly since the 90s (though I did buy a brand new one 6 years ago).
In my experience the upgrade that’s more likelly to improve it the cheapest is RAM, then a graphics card if you’re a gamer.
However there were two transition periods were the best upgrade by far was something else: the first was back in the day when hardware 3D accelerator boards were invented (Quake with a 3dfx was night and day compared to software rendering) and the other one was the transition for HDD to SSD, both being massive jumps in performance.
python@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ooh, totally! I did have an SSD in there before, but it was only 256GB, so I had to store most files on the HDD and be extremely selective about what to install to C:. Going up to 8TB felt very liberating, I no longer have to fear that an npm install might crash my whole machine! (at least not due to space constraints, npm will figure out how to crash it for other reasons)
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
If the crashing stopped by replacing the SSD probably the SSD is end-of-life. SSDs basically wear down with each write action and when they reach their terabytes written limit they can start crashing the system.
python@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
That might be the case too! I do believe it was more of a skill issue in my case because I was booting Linux Mint from a 40GB partition (couldn’t free any more space than that on the old SSD) and enabled too many system backups (they recommended 2 daily and 2 on boot, and I just followed the recommendation without thinking about the space implications). Those alone put me at around 35-38GB of used space, and an npm install is usually around 1 GB, but log and temp files can sometimes balloon up when things go wrong. So it wasn’t really a crash per say, just Mint’s “shut down the system when you run out of storage space” protection triggering haha