Yeah I just uninstall the useless apps I never use and switch the rest off from running in the background. Thats about it. I will agree however, this kind of thing was important when you had a single core 166MHz Pentium and 32MB pf ram in 1996!
I have a pile of 12 1TB 2.5" sitting behind me. The main use now is slapping them free of charge in a customers PC as a backup/data drive or using them to hand over recovered data.
Set everything at 16bit 44kHz Red Book standard and forget about it.
The only people that say they can tell the difference are boomers that spent $50,000 on their hi-fi but havent heard anything over 15kHz since 1995.
It's now all within the realm of "how lucky was that application over the last?" You can use the same paste 4 different times and get +1 -1 +2 -2 depending on luck of the draw.
Lucky you got 11 years out of it before it failed.
I had a customer bring me one once for a service. As part, I clean up the machines as they usually look like a dog slept on them for 6 months. Anyway I started cleaning it (it was sticky) and it just got worse and worse. The wrist rest went...
It seems we are in the realm of ever diminishing returns. The only reason to upgrade a CPU within 2 years would be you screwed up massive with the first one (bought a $100 chip) and underestimated your needs.
But that's not the case here. This is upgrading because you can, not because you...