SC Tom wrote:

I really can't justify getting a new system just to have something new
to play with :-) This one works fine, and is plenty fast for what I
use it for (some FPS games, video editing, etc.).

Have you considered buying use RAM sticks instead of paying new prices?

If that is still too expensive, start reviewing Task Manager to see what
processes are running after you boot into Windows. Could be you could
eliminate lots of startup programs, or disable services (e.g., AMD keeps
wanting to lots their hotkey service, but I don't need hotkeys to change
video settings).

In Task Manager, how much physical memory is there and how much is
committed? While unused memory is wasted memory, you still want enough
free memory to run another program without having it paged out to the
much slower pagefile on the hard disk.

One of the upgrades I did with my 10-year old salvaged computer was to
move an SSD in place of an HDD as the OS+app drive. Got some zippy
improvement with that. Without all the data files, check how much of
your HDD is consumed by Windows and the apps. That'll give an idea of
how big an SSD you should get. All the data files will get moved with
the HDD (actually they'll just stay on the HDD and all the OS and app
files get deleted, but I find formatting the drive and restoring the
data from backups is cleaner). I used a 256GB SSD for many years, and
still only consumed a little over half of it with Windows 7 and apps.
Games got moved (installed anew) on the HDD, because video games don't
speed up much on SSDs. They may load a couple seconds faster, but they
won't play faster. Game developers have long realized they needed to
buffer the textures and objects in memory to improve gaming response.
The salvaged computer only had 8GB which was also the max it could
handle, but that and the SSD were more than sufficient to keep using the
old computer for many more years.

SSDs are a lot cheaper now. $32 from Newegg for a Crucial 240GB SSD
(https://www.newegg.com/crucial-bx500...2E16820156187). I
didn't check its specs to see if it is a fast SSD (i.e., write speed).
With the pagefile on the SSD, even paged out processes will reload their
memory blocks faster.

Reduce how many programs and services are loaded on Windows startup.
Change to using an SSD for the OS+app drive. A bit of manual labor and
an SSD would probably make your old computer more zippy. You're at 16GB
now for system RAM. That should be far more than you need for how you
use your computer. More likely you have to eliminate the superfluous
leech processes that consume memory and CPU cycles. You'll get more
noticeable speed/responsiveness from your computer by going to an SSD
than adding more memory of which most remains unused. In my new box
that has 64GB NVMe m.2 memory, right now (without any video games
running) it is using only 5.4 GB, so 58.4 GB is unused.