A potato is me/cheap user experience upgrades

[classicdrogn]

It's still so amazing to me just how much of a difference in speed there is, even for things I wouldn't expect like web browsing. As long as the network spee is semi-decent page that's just text like GameFAQs or FFn et cetera is just click and it's there, faster than it would take to load and render something saved to my own computer before. Really chose well naming this one Velocirapture after my speedster character.

If you're not on a machine with an SSD for the operating system, I'd kick that up to the top of your upgrade list for sheer overall quality of life improvements. It won't shave off more than a small fraction of computation or graphics heavy tasks like a new CPU or GPU, but anything that needs to hit your swap file or libraries/DLLs will see great improvements, along with the time from flipping the switch to being booted and ready to use or to load up software. Just be aware that SSDs need a lot of free space on them for best performance and to keep them from burning through their write-cycle lifetime and plan accordingly in your disk usage - spinning rust still wins hands down at dollars per megabyte for media files or big modern games' massive collections of high resolution texture maps.