You don’t always have to spend lots of money to make your computer or laptop work better. Sometimes due to physical damage you have no choice but to replace computer parts like motherboards, hard drives and memory.

Replacing parts is only some of the time and a lot of the time there are cheaper alternatives which can be done to save you a lot of money.

Below are a lost of ways you can  improve your computer on the cheap without having to change everything up or spend a lot of money. If you use your computer a lot this might not be for you, but for someone who uses their computer every now and again and doesn’t want to spend the money, a lot of this will be useful.

Buy an External Hard Drive

If you are running out of space on your computer and don’t mind carrying an external hard drive around you, using one could solve a lot of issues you might have with storage space.

An external hard drive will not be as responsive as an internal drive and I don’t recommend them for anyone wanting to play games off or run their operating system from.

But if you are looking for more space on your computer for files such as media like music, videos, photos or storage for your documents, an external hard drive can be a very cheap and fast way to store more files.

Try a new Operating System

Your OS (operating system) is the environment on your computer that ruins all you pretty much see. If you are using a PC you are most likely using Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or 10. Microsoft make most of the worlds operating systems but they are not the only ones.

There are plenty of other options out there such as different distributions of Linux such as CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian.

You might not like a lot of them as some do have a learning curve. But if you are looking to upgrade your computer or fix some bugs you are not happy with, trying a new or updated operating system like the free upgrade from Windows 8 to 10 might be for you.

Use an External Keyboard

As computers get older components start to break down. Laptops are great in that you can move around with them and you don’t have the restricts of a desktop. But when components start to break down like keyboards and screens you can be in a position which might question if you should spend the money to repair it.

Buying a whole new internal keyboard and having someone install it on an old system would probably not be worth it. Just finding a keyboard for an old laptop would probably be hard enough if possible at all, and the price would probably turn most customers away.

If you don not mind either carrying an external keyboard around with you or fixing your laptop to a single location replacing your internal laptop keyboard with a external USB keyboard you could probably get for $15 form Kmart or Target will probably do the trick.