6 things I do to my PC now that I used to think were only for broke college kids

I've been building PCs since I was in my early teens. Obviously, I had very limited funds, so I had to learn how to make the most of every dollar. As an adult, having an expendable income and overwhelming FOMO have pushed me toward more high-end builds, leaving the penny-pinching to broke college kids.

But now, with the PC market at its worst in years, I'm having to go back to those days of being thrifty once more.

I've stopped buying new components

My shopping habits have been put on hold

There's no beating around the bush. In the past year, the PC market has officially crashed . It's not the first crash in the last decade, but it caught many by surprise, and it's nowhere near being over.

Meanwhile, I had big plans for this year (well, prior to when prices started going up in flames). My PC isn't old or bad by any stretch, but I wanted to buy some upgrades, including more RAM, an extra SSD, and perhaps even a new CPU or GPU. Did I need any of them? Debatable, but when you work with PC hardware day in, day out, it's easy to give in to temptation and upgrade your rig much more than you need to.

Needless to say, all of those plans have been put on hold. With the RTX 5090 selling for upwards of $4,000 and SSDs and RAM being priced at 300% more than last year, it's not the right time to shop for any PC parts.

If I do shop, it's probably used

I was wary at first, but not anymore

Depending on where you shop and what you're buying, you might be able to get a better deal by buying used components right now. Well, scratch that—it will be a better deal, obviously, as retailers have hiked up their prices a whole lot, but shopping for used PC parts can be quite risky, so you'll be saving money while taking on that risk.

I'll admit that while I have sold components in the past, and also re-used my own, I never really used to buy them used until recently. I picked up a used GPU (RTX 4070 Ti) for a friend's build recently, though, and found it a good deal all around. Much cheaper than buying a new graphics card, perfectly adequate for my friend's needs, and relatively safe, as I bought it directly from a retailer and got a 30-day warranty on it.

I adjust my expectations

Do I need to play at 240Hz in 4K?

This kind of ties in with the two previous points, but the point I'm making echoes through this article: 2026 is not the time to buy stuff. It's the time to adjust your expectations.

That's what I'm doing, and telling my friends to do, too. This isn't new for me, as I've spent years trying to convince people they don't need all the upgrades that might seem worth it, because ultimately, the difference between playing on High settings vs. Ultra isn't as big as many people make it out to be.

Ask yourself whether your games really do look that much worse with lower settings. You might be able to skip upgrading by leaning into DLSS, FSR, or Lossless Scaling , as well as simply cutting back on some resource-heavy settings, like ray tracing, shadows, and clutter.

I optimize the heck out of my PC

It's easy to get lazy when upgrades are abundant

In the spirit of making do with what I already own, I went all-in on PC optimization tricks . I can't say my PC's been particularly slow as it's still fairly new-ish at two years old, but older desktops can massively benefit from 20 minutes of digging through the settings.

Some of the things you should definitely check include verifying whether you're using the right XMP/EXPO profile for your RAM, updating the BIOS and the drivers, and checking whether Resizable BAR is on. I also like to undervolt the GPU so it doesn't throttle itself into a lower clock speed.

Lastly, make sure your SSD is sitting at a nice, cushy 80% capacity at most. A full SSD always underperforms .

I close browser tabs and get rid of useless apps

Buy a new SSD and RAM? In this economy?

I'm a notorious tab hoarder, but having a million tabs open at once will eat your RAM like it's candy. It's especially taxing when you're also running other software at the same time. So, instead of buying more RAM, which is obviously a terrible idea right now, I turned on Memory Saver in Chrome and have been better at closing irrelevant tabs.

Getting rid of useless apps, namely the ones that start on boot, is another thing. You'll find a lot of useless junk if you go through your Task Manager and do some googling. Don't uninstall things you're not sure about, but go over the resource hogs, see what they do, and uninstall them if possible. At minimum, prevent them from launching on startup.

I actually bought a prebuilt

Not for me, but it still felt bad

I'm one of the most anti-prebuilt people you'll ever meet in this space, and this is because I've seen my fair share of instances where buying the wrong prebuilt went, well, very wrong. But this year, I actually bought a prebuilt for my mom instead of building her a PC from scratch.

Money was the reason, of course. Adding up the cost of individual components revealed that I'd actually be better off buying this ready-made Lenovo PC for her instead of putting it all together. Prebuilt manufacturers haven't all raised their prices yet, so I was able to get a good deal on a good enough PC.

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It's a good time to be resourceful

If you have all the money in the world, by all means, build a PC with an RTX 5090 and 128GB of DDR5 RAM. But if you want to make meaningful purchases where the cost and performance all add up, now's not the time. Sit tight and wait for price drops, which may not be for a long time.