SSD drive or More Ram?

[Niheel]

I want to increase the speed of my computer and only have few resources to spend.

What would be a the best option, upgrade ram from 2 to 4 gigs or add an 128g intel SSD drive as main OS drive?

[MMcCarthy]

In my opinion upgrading from 2gb to 4gb of ram is your best option. Just one word or warning though, I recently crashed a PC because it couldn't handle the ram upgrade so be careful that the ram you buy is compatible with your motherboard.

[Niheel]

Thanks Mary, I will test out the memory upgrade first. If that doesn't work I guess i could go for the SSD upgrade.

[sicarie]

I'd second Mary's option as well for a first attempt, but it could depend on what you're doing. RAM is pretty cheap these days and even bumping it up a little can do quite a bit to your performance.

However, SSD's are awesome on read/writes, so they could be useful in things like OS/boot partitions, databases, or apps that generate high log files. The caveat here is that they wear quickly and crash hard - if you're using it as a data drive you want a GREAT backup system and not just a good one so that recovery isn't aggravating. Recovery from an SSD is not easy or cheap - if it is even possible ;)

I'd recommend doing a general system cleanup as well - make sure things like unnecessary Quick Launch icons are removed, all your startup programs are necessary, possibly defrag your hdd depending on Windows version, etc... Minimize the work your computer has to do in the first place to get a little bit of a boost without even upgrading.