What are the guidelines to up grade modern computer?

Answer 1

The best place to start is the computer manufactorers website. Then look at the manual for your computer. It will tell you the kind, and the amount of RAM you can upgrade to. In fact, it will tell you anything you need to know to upgrade. It is a broad question as you could upgrade RAM, video card, hard drive. Just depends what you want and the website is a good place to start.

Answer 2

If you are able to identify the motherboard inside your computer (and we must assume that you are talking about a desktop here since laptops are proprietary and, therefore, not upgradeable), then you should be able to locate a manual from its manufacturer to tell you what type of RAM, CPU socket, and more it uses. However, if your machine is more than about three years old or so, you might want to consider upgrading the core of the machine anyway. This means that you will probably want to consider replacing the motherboard and CPU and possibly the RAM, depending on whether the current motherboards uses the same type of RAM as the new motherboard and whether the amount of RAM you have is sufficient for what you seek.

Be aware that if you want to do an "in-place" upgrade of the core, meaning that you don't want to have to reinstall everything from scratch, then you better have a copy of Windows 7 or 8 on the machine and be ready with the motherboard manufacturer's driver disc to install the new drivers as appropriate.

Doing this significant of an upgrade is tedious and can be time-consuming but is not very difficult. If you have more specific questions or need further guidance, feel free to drop me a line and I will see what I can do to help you out.