These performance tips will work for any PC
running Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8.
Want more speed? "This PC is so slow!" This is a cry that's been uttered by
PC users since, well, PCs were first invented.
Since we don't think that there's
anyone out there who wouldn't like to squeeze a little more performance out of
their PC, we've pulled together six top tips that will help you get the most
out of your Windows PC, without having to spend a fortune.
These tips will work for any PC
running Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.
Get
rid of the junk
There's nothing like having loads of
junk installed on a system to turn even the best PC into a river of molasses.
There's two sorts of junk to
consider. The first is the stuff that the PC makers install into new PCs, and
the other is the junk that you (and other people using the PC) have installed
on it.
You
could spend your whole weekend manually tracking down this junk, but it makes
much more sense to get a tool to do the job automatically, and the best tool
out there for this job is PC Decrapifier. This free download will scan your system and
quickly (and safely) remove any junk on your system.
After
running PC Decrapifier you might optionally want to do a pass using another
free tool called CCleaner. This will go a bit deeper and clean your system of
temporary files, log files and other junk.
Add
more RAM
While not a free option, installing
RAM is, without a doubt, the single best bang-for-your-buck hardware upgrade
you can carry out on a PC. And adding RAM has never been cheaper, with an extra
4GB costing around $60.
Finding
what RAM your PC takes is easy. Head over to a vendor such as Kingston and
use the online search tool find the right RAM for you. There are also handy videos that will show you how to go about
installing the new RAM in your desktop or notebook PC.
If you've got a reasonably fast USB drive
laying about the place then you can use this to give your PC a performance
boost by using it as a ReadyBoost drive.
The ReadyBoost feature, which is part
of Windows Vista and above, and allows flash memory – in the form of a USB
flash drive, SD Card, Compact Flash card, or SSD – to be used as a high-speed
cache to boost performance as long as they meet the following criteria:
·
Capacity of at least 256MB, with at
least 64KB of free space
·
At least a 2.5MB/sec throughput for
4KB random reads
·
At least a 1.75MB/sec throughput for
1MB random writes
Making use of ReadyBoost is easy.
·
Plug the drive into the PC.
·
Either click on General options > Speed up my system from the AutoPlay dialog box, or right-click on the drive
in Windows Explorer and choose Properties and
then click on the ReadyBoost tab.
·
Choose whether you want to dedicate
the drive to ReadyBoost (which prevents you from using it as storage), or use a
portion of it for ReadyBoost.
·
Click OK.
Defragment
your drives
Carrying out a regular defragment of
your PC is a good idea if you want to keep it in tip-top condition. The only
think to bear in mind is that you shouldn't, under any circumstances,
defragment an SSD drive. Not only will you get zero benefit from it, but you
will seriously shorten the life of the drive.
But if you are still running regular
hard drives then Windows is set to defragment your system once a week, but you
should check to see that this is on and that all your drives are defragmented.
You can run the Disk Defragmenter any time you feel you've made a lot of
changes to the data on your drives.
It can be accessed from:
·
Windows Vista/7: Start > All Programs > Accessories >System Tools > Disk
Defragmenter
·
Windows 8: Open the Charms bar and search for "Optimize
Drives" and then click on Defragment and optimize your
drives
There's a lot of voodoo written on
the web about defragmenting drives, and there are all manner of arcane
command-line switches you can use to carry out different sorts of defragment.
In my experience, a simple defrag once a week is all you need.
Add
power
If you have a notebook system that's
a bit sluggish then the easiest way to speed if up is to connect it to a power
supply!
Windows can detect if it is running
on a notebook systems and it will switch over to a low power profile when it
detects that it is running on battery power. While this is good for battery
life, it's bad for performance, so if you want more oomph from the system,
connecting it to a power supply will restore performance to normal levels.
You can go digging around in the
bowels of Windows and make permanent changes to the power profiles, but I don't
recommend this as it will have a huge detrimental effect on battery life. It's
much easier to remember to hook up the system to a power supply when you want
more performance.
Install the latest drivers
Install the latest drivers
The drivers that control your
hardware can have a huge effect on how well your system runs, and one of the
drivers that's key to system performance is the graphics card driver.
While people who rely on the default
Windows driver or who don't care about performance might never need to think
about their graphics card driver, anyone who care about getting the best from
their hardware – and especially anyone who is into PC gaming – should probably
check to see if there's an updated driver every few months because it can make
a huge difference to how well games run.
Other drivers worth checking
regularly are the motherboard drivers (which can have a huge effect of data
transfer rates to and from your hard drives), and drivers for any external
hardware you use.
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