4 Things to Know About Upgrading a Dell Optiplex 3020 to 16GB

16GB is worth it for basic office work and multitasking DDR3 RAM is cheap, and doubling from 8GB stops the system from swapping. With 16GB, you can run a dozen browser tabs, Excel, and Spotify without stuttering.

The CPU is still fine for daily tasks The Haswell-era i5-4590 handles browsing, email, and light office apps. RAM won’t fix a slow CPU, but this one is plenty for typical use.

Upgrade the SSD before adding RAM If the machine still has a spinning hard drive, spend your $15 on an SSD first. The old hard drive is the real bottleneck, not the memory.

With both upgrades, the machine is usable for another year or two If you already have an SSD, adding 16GB of DDR3 is a cheap way to keep the Optiplex running smoothly. With both, it’s essentially a free computer for basic tasks.