This is the first in a series of articles that give you proven techniques for speeding up your computer. In this article, we look at the hard drive, RAM, video cards, and installed programs. While all of these make a difference, the real diffence is you, and how you use your computer.
When looking to speed your computer, there are several things to look at, some are software related; others are hardware related.
The first thing we’ll look at is the hard drive. A common question by users who want to speed up their computer is: “Do I need I bigger hard drive? That’s certainly a consideration, but before you shell out your hard-earned cash, let’s do some diagnostic steps first.
The first step is to defrag the drive and see how that impacts the drive’s performance.
A second step would be to look at how much data is stored on the drive. If there's too much information, this will cause your drive to slow down. Generally, I recommend that you only use only 50% of the drive for storage of files. Any more than that will begin to degrade the drive's performance.
A simple solution is to remove unnecessary programs. That alone will make a big difference in improving your computer's performance.
Another option is to install a second drive as a swap drive. This could be an IDE or SATA drive, or you may want to install a Flash drive. The only caveat to installing Flash drives is that they’re still quite expensive. You can get a lot more bang for your buck using a platter style of drive.
But there are some diminishing returns. If you get a hard drive that runs at 10,000 RPM, you're likely to run into cooling issues. Likewise, if you get a fast laptop, it's likely to run hot and if you're in the habit of placing the laptop on your lap, you could get burned.
A case in point is my current laptop, the Asus M51n. I could have gotten a faster configuration, but it would have run considerably hotter, especially at the air port. According to the reports I read, I could run the risk of getting burned. As a result, I opted for the slower configuration.
RAM would be the next thing to consider. If you don’t have enough it will definitely impact your computer’s performance. But how do you determine how much is enough? It depends on your needs. If you work with office applications and surf the Web, 2GB of RAM is plenty.
If you’re a hard core gamer or an artist working with high end computer graphics, you’ll want a lot of RAM. 4GB is good and you’ll want to make sure it’s the fastest RAM that your machine will support. Not all RAM is created equal, so it’s important to check that out first.
One last thing to look at is how many programs you have running at one time. If there are too many open, this will degrade system performance. Here, a simple fix is to close some programs to free up system resources.
Another issue is the video card. You want to buy a dedicated card with plenty of video RAM. A minimum amount would be 256 MB, but a better option would be 512 or even 1024 MB of RAM. If your video card supports OpenGL or if you can obtain hardware acceleration, that’s even better.
