If your like me and you do a lot of high powered, intensive work on your PC then you will inevitably reach a bottle neck in performance. Or, if your PC is quite old and you’ve only just been able to install windows 7 on the minimum specs, then you might be interested to know there are a few things you can do to improve performance. That said, it should be pretty obvious how to do this, but if you don’t here’s a few easy things you can do without dramatically altering your PC’s architecture (or voiding it’s warranty).
- Turn of Aero and other visual effects- Aero uses quite a bit of your graphics card’s power as does window animations. Turn them off by right clicking on ‘Computer > System properties > Advanced Tab > Performance > Settings > Adjust for best performance.
- Disable gadgets. Gadgets are like having small programs running all the time. They may look nice and be useful, but they still use a significant part of your RAM. Turn them off by clicking the X on each gadget. One gadget that you might not want to turn off is the CPU Meter gadget, which shows the amount of CPU and RAM usage.
- Regular defragmentation of Hard Drives. Traditionally, PC hardware and the Windows OS places newly created information on the nearest available space on a hard drive, even if that information is the same part of another piece of information. This is called fragmentation. De-fragmentation is the process whereby all this information is re-organised so that similar things are once again place near each other, meaning the hard drive read head has less distance to travel to access all information- the actual speed at which that information is recovered is faster.
- Re-configure the start up. Do this by searching for “msconfig”. Click on the Start up tab and disable non essential start up items such as Adobe reader, Quicktime, Office etc. But be very careful NOT to disable ESSENTIAL items such as Windows, Explorer, your Antivirus products, Audio. You’ll only need to really do this if start up is taking, say for example, over 2 minutes or more. This is getting towards the more extreme end of speed increases and should not be done lightly.
- The same goes for the Services tab. Only alter things in here if you know what you are doing and are completely sure they are not necessary. Again, in general you shouldn’t need to alter anything in here.
If your desperate for more speed, you might want to consider buying new, faster components. First though, check out your performance rating by searching for ‘inform’ and open “Performance and Information Tools” and let Windows decided your performance score.
There are much more precise and complex methods to increase speed which involve modifying the speed at which your hardware works. This is called Overclocking. Say your CPU currently runs at 2.3ghz, you could theoretically change this so it runs at 2.6ghz or more. The same goes for your RAM, Graphics card and motherboard. However, with increased speed comes increased heat generation. Overclocking can completely ruin hardware to the point where it actually melts. This is why extreme cooling solutions are needed, like Extra large heat sinks, more fans, Liquid cooling and even for some people, Liquid Nitrogen.
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