What is upgradability?

According to Merriam-Webster:

• : to raise or improve the grade of: as
  • a : to improve (livestock) by use of purebred sires
  • b : to advance to a job requiring a higher level of skill especially as part of a training program
  • c : to raise the quality of
  • d : to raise the classification and usually the price of without improving the quality
  • e : to extend the usefulness of (as a device)

For the sake of this site, we'll primarily try to focus on e: "to extend the usefulness of (as a device)."

Everyone (or at least most Americans) have lots of things that they use regularly and get good use out of, but could be replaced by newer, better, faster things that wouldn't do anything fundamentally different, but just "better". The problems with replacing something with a newer version is that it costs money (which most people don't have a lot of), creates more waste (which some people would prefer to avoid), and sometimes the new thing doesn't work quite as well as the old. That's where upgrading comes in.

While some things can only be replaced, lots of things can be given a longer life by performing a few simple (and maybe sometimes not so simple) upgrades. Granted, everyone likes the "new toy buzz", but if that's really what you're interested in, you're not reading this article in the first place.

However, this isn't about "hacking" or "pimping" or "overhaulin'" or "making" (while they are all useful in their own right), this is about spending a little time and a little money and getting something more useful, while not necessarily more flash. Again, if you're down at the performance tuners looking for spinners to go on your 300 horsepower, gold flecked purple, neon ground lit Saturn hatchback, you're probably not reading this.

So, if you're still reading this, you probably spend an extra second or two making sure you got virtually all of the peanut butter out of the bottom of the jar, but that's ok, so do we. And you have probably, at one time or another, looked into upgrading your computer, laptop, bicycle, perhaps even your car, and so have we. So, give us some time to collect our thoughts, and we'll start putting up some (hopefully) simple guides to help the non-fanatical gadget geeks and friends sort out how to upgrade.

Upgradability

p.s. if you're looking for the site that sells AMD K6 CPUs, it's at UpgradeAbility.com.