6:27 PM Boost your PC perfomance |
Boost your PC Performance There’s
so much information out there about PC performance (especially on Windows
machines), it’s difficult to be sure what’s right and what’s not so helpful.
Here are 10 proven performance enhancements you can make to your computer, many
of which are free. 1: Get rid of malware New machines shouldn’t have malware on them. But one of the most
common causes of the "my PC used to be fast, and now it isn’t!” complaint
is actually the presence of malware. Malware can sneak onto a computer in a
zillion different ways and quite often it sits in the background slowing your
machine to as it sends out spam emails, searches for other computers to infect,
works on cracking cryptography, or any number of the other nefarious tasks that
hackers like to use their botnet slaves for. There’s a good chance that the
malware brought even more friends with it (that’s often how you see computers
with thousands of viruses on them not long after the initial infection), and
the infection may be bad enough to justify a wipe and reload. My first step in
investigating a slow system is usually a virus scan. 2: Upgrade to a better
video card For
typical business productivity tasks, a video card probably isn’t an upgrade
that will have a lot of value. But for gamers and other similar uses, a video
card is a slam dunk upgrade. If your current card and motherboard support SLI
or CrossFireX, adding a second card and bridging them will be a good option as
well. In some scenarios, better video cards can be a huge benefit even without
heavy onscreen video work, because certain applications can leverage the GPUs
for calculations. 3: Get a faster drive Many times, the real performance issue is the speed of disks. Look
at numbers like the RPMs, cache size, seek speed, and transfer rate to buy a
faster drive. Often, a good drive will seem slow because the
computer’s power settings are allowing it to spin down. You may want to
consider changing these settings to make sure that the disk is more likely to
be ready to work when you need it to. While the SSD vs. hard disk debate is
still continuing, SSDs usually seem to feel faster to users.
Boot times are usually cut for sure. But something about an SSD makes a system
feel more responsive or "snappy” to use, and for day-to-day work, that’s a
great feeling. 4: Address hardware and
driver issues All too often, system slowness is actually a sign of hardware
problems. For example, if your CPU isn’t being properly cooled, it will often
have its speed reduced in an effort to keep it from overheating. Recoverable
errors with disk access can kill your throughput while not showing up as a dead
drive. And bad hardware drivers can often make the whole system slow,
especially video drivers. Using utilities to check your CPU speed and various
temperatures, scanning for hard drive errors, and updating your drivers is a
good start to investigating performance problems. Often, problems caused by
hardware or drivers are not just poor speeds, but system flakiness too. 5: Use a RAID Using a RAID can dramatically lower the read and write speeds of
your disks, depending upon the RAID level you choose. You will want to do some
research to see what RAID level fits your needs the best. Personally, I am a
fan of RAID 1, 6, and 10 because I feel that they offer appropriate levels of
data protection along with a good measure of speed improvements. 6: Try a different browser It’s no secret: Different browsers perform differently, and most
people spend a lot of time in their Web browser. Benchmarks really muddy the
browser speed conversation. Some browsers perform well on some but do badly on
others, even when they are supposed to test the same thing. The problem with
the benchmarks is that what they usually test is not real work
performance! While JavaScript is an important part of the modern Web, few Web
applications beat on the JavaScript engine hard enough to produce a noticeable
impact on performance. That said, it’s been my experience that the Chrome
browser is the fastest for actual work. If you want to have your
Web browser feel more responsive and lively, consider a switch to Chrome. 7: Remove junk It’s easy to have a computer get loaded up with junk that slows it
down. The worst part is, we invite this garbage into our lives
by installing "helpful” utilities, toolbars, and other add-ons. I could
easily write a list of 10 kinds of computer-stalling junk. Here are some of the
things you’ll want to seek out and remove for best performance:
8: Add a
faster DNS lookup server Most ISPs love to brag about how much bandwidth they are giving
you. But they don’t mind letting the rest of their infrastructure slowly get
overwhelmed or deteriorate. Among the biggest offenders are the DNS servers our
ISPs use. If you want to know why things seem to take forever to start loading,
slow DNS servers are often the cause. Consider adding a fast DNS server as your
primary DNS server in your TCP/IP settings. Google’s Public DNS server is a great option. 9: Defrag Defragging your hard drives is a great way to get some more
performance. While modern Windows systems automatically defrag on a regular
basis, I’ve found that the Windows defragging is fairly unaggressive. We’ve
reviewed a lot of different defrag apps here at TechRepublic. I suggest that
you check out your alternatives and find one that does a better job for you. 10: Check network
connectivity Time and time again, "system slowness” actually is caused by
networking issues. Our computers do so much on the Internet that slowness there
can affect just about everything you do on a regular basis. While there isn’t
enough space to write an exhausting troubleshooting list here, some of the
things you should try (or investigate) are:
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