Get out of the PC slow lane, with some of our handy speed tips
When a PC starts to get a bit old, you might start wondering whether it’s time to spend money on an upgrade. But before you do that, it’s worth having a look at what you can do to speed up a system without spending any money!
Most of the time, people don’t upgrade their PC because their current one isn’t capable of doing what they want; they upgrade because it’s become bad at doing what they want. But inside the slow, chugging system you own is the lightning-fast system you bought. You just need to know how to draw it back out.
That’s why we’ve come up with a few ways you can ‘upgrade’ your system for free. Take the advice in this article and we can guarantee your system will run better without you having to spend a single penny on it.
Speed Up Your Hard Drive
Hard drive speed is directly related to system performance, and what most people interpret as a lack of RAM or a slow processor is actually the result of a hard drive that’s just become so cluttered and disorganised that the system can’t get the data it needs quickly enough. Improving your disk access speed allows your system to boot quicker, load applications faster and can even improve the frame-rates in games. With that in mind, here’s how to get your hard drive running like it’s new.
1. Delete Any Temporary Files.
The first and most obvious piece of advice you’ll hear, but that’s because it’s as true now as it ever was: deleting temporary files is a great way to recover space and reduce the number of files on your system, both of which make it run faster.
That’s because Windows has a lot of temporary directories, and if you don’t keep on top of them, your old and unwanted files can build up to enormous proportions. Although you never use these files, they still get indexed for searches, scanned for viruses and defragmented when you run defragmentation. They waste your time and space merely by existing!
The quickest way to find these files is to type ‘%TEMP%’ into the search box or run dialogue and press enter. Everything in this folder (it’ll be something like ‘C:\Users\<yourname>\AppData\Local\Temp’) can be safely deleted. Some files may currently be in use, but don’t worry, they can be deleted in the future instead.
To find other temp files on your system, you may want to use a program to find them for you. Piriform makes an app called CCleaner (www.piriform.com/ccleaner), which can automatically cleanse your PC of all common temporary files, including cookies, web history, temp files and recycle bin items. You don’t need to run it often, but it’ll spot things even the most careful manual search would miss.
2. Run Defragmentation
Once you’ve reduced the amount of unnecessary files on your hard drive, you should now defragment it to speed up access times.
Defragmenting a hard drive takes ages, but it’s the best way to improve access times without completely wiping the drive and starting again. All files take up disk sectors, and fragmentation is what happens when large files are split up and placed in non-consecutive disk sectors – usually because there’s no gap big enough to contain them all (which tends to happen because a drive got too full).
If that sounds complicated, imagine it a bit like filing books. The logical way to store all seven Harry Potter books would be to place them next to each other, so you can instantly get the next one when you need it. If there isn’t enough space on your shelf, you might have to place them in gaps far apart. When the time comes to retrieve those books, it takes you more time to get them if they aren’t next to one another. The same principal applies to files that have been broken up. They don’t take up any more space, but they do take more time to retrieve, and the more fragmented the drive is, the more this time stacks up.
Defragmentation essentially moves all the books on the shelf into the most logical order. Large files are stored in single, continuous chunks, and the most frequently accessed files are stored in the places that are easiest to read from.
Unfortunately, modern hard drives take huge amounts of time to defragment completely, which can be very inconvenient. An alternative is to use a program such as Piriform’s Defraggler (www.piriform.com/defraggler), which allows you to defragment and optimise individual files and folders, such as game directories, your Windows directory or your inbox.
Speed Up Your RAM
If you can’t or don’t want to install extra RAM, there are still things you can do to improve the way your current memory operates. Faster memory access ensures smoother and more reliable operation, which is something everyone wants! RAM itself is actually very fast, but it often has to interact with its ‘pagefile’, a section of your hard drive that it shunts data in and out of when it’s not in use, so to speed up your RAM, you actually have to speed up pagefile access. How do you do that?
1. Defragment The Pagefile
One way is to defragment it. The principle is the same as we just explained, but the pagefile is a special case. The pagefile (normally called ‘pagefile.sys’ and found in your Windows drive’s root directory) is constantly being written and rewritten to, which makes it very fragmented. This also means you can’t actually defragment it from within Windows, because it’s always locked and in use.
What you can do is download a program like UltraDefrag (ultradefrag.sourceforge.net). You can use this to defragment your pagefile before Windows has booted, using its ‘boot time defragmentation’ mode.
2. Move The Pagefile
Along similar lines, you can speed up pagefile access by storing it on the fastest possible storage medium, whether that’s a solid-state drive, a fast hard drive or even a USB key.
If you have two physical hard drives that are the same speed, you can improve RAM speed by storing the pagefile on the drive you use the least. This will ensure your system’s resources are shared more evenly between the two drives: you can run a program or game off one drive, while the other is reading and writing to virtual memory, meaning neither operation gets interrupted by the other.
To move your pagefile, click on the Start menu, type ‘Advanced System Settings’ in the search box and click ‘View advanced system settings’. Under the ‘Advanced’ tab, find the section called ‘Performance’ and click ‘Settings.’ Again, under the ‘Advanced’ tab, find the ‘Virtual Memory’ section and click ‘Change…’
Here, you can uncheck ‘Automatically manage paging file size for all drives’, then choose another drive for the pagefile to go on. You’ll need at least as much space as you have RAM – so 4GB of space for 4GB of RAM. Once you’ve done this, click ‘Set’, then completely remove the pagefile from the original location (usually C drive). Click OK to exit on each dialogue until prompted to reboot, then do so.
Speed Up Windows
Your Windows installation might look as simple as the day you installed it, but months (or years!) of application installations, system tweaks and settings changes will have definitely slowed it down, so gradually you might not even realise. What can you do to speed it up again?
1. Disable Visual Effects
You may not realise, but disabling the visual effects in Windows can free up processor and graphics resources so they can be used for more pressing concerns. It’s unlikely to make much difference if you have a sufficiently advanced GPU, but on low-resource systems it’s an absolute must.
To turn off effects, right-click ‘Computer’ and select ‘Properties’. From this dialogue, select ‘Advanced System Settings’, then under the ‘Advanced’ tab, find the ‘Performance’ box and click ‘Settings’. Here, you should select the ‘Custom’ radio button, then uncheck as little or as much as you like in the box below. You may want to keep some of the effects enabled (particularly ‘Smooth edges of screen fonts’), but each one you deselect should make Windows that little bit more responsive.
2. Reinstall Windows
The extreme solution to chronic Windows slowdown is drastic but has a 100% success rate: you have to reformat your hard drive and reinstall Windows from scratch.
Over time, operating systems become slow and cluttered. Every program you install and uninstall leaves its mark, and eventually it’s almost impossible to get the system running as fast as when it was originally set up thanks to the general mess they leave behind. If you have a copy of Windows available, you do have the option to throw in the towel and start afresh with a clean installation. It’s certain to be faster, although it does take quite a lot of preparation and configuration to ensure you don’t lose all your important files, so it really should be a last resort.
If you choose to take this route, preparation is important. Before you reformat your drive, remember to make extensive backups. You’re not going to enjoy using a faster PC if you lose all your documents, downloads, emails and programs as a result! When you’re sure you have everything saved, deleting and reinstalling Windows will leave you with a PC that runs almost as well as the day you bought it. It’s a bit too extensive a process to guide you through here, but look online for ‘clean install’ instructions if you’re interested in trying it out. Remember that you’ll need a legitimate copy of Windows or a valid system restore disc from your retailer!
Speed Up Your Graphics Card
If you have a graphics card that’s starting to show its age, you don’t necessarily have to replace it. To conclude this article, here are our tips for improving your card’s performance without switching out any hardware.
1. Install Better Drivers
As a general rule, you don’t speed up your computer by installing new software. The exception to this rule is with graphics drivers, which are often released precisely because they speed games up. In this case, you’re not adding extra software, you’re replacing the existing code with better code.
This largely only applies if you have a separate video card (on-chip GPUs don’t usually need their own drivers), but otherwise keeping the latest graphics drivers is the best way to make sure you’re getting the best speeds out of your hardware, particularly in the most recent games.
If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you could also take an alternative step and install third-party drivers. While you’ll only get proper support if you’re using the official ones, alternative driver releases (such as the Omega drivers for AMD/Radeon cards) are compiled by enthusiasts to give you the best combination of features and performance and go beyond what the official releases offer – but on the understanding that if anything goes wrong, you’re responsible for it!
In practice, it’s not likely that anything bad will happen. At best, you’ll see faster speeds out of your graphics card. If you’re unlucky, the speeds in the game you’re playing will be slightly slower. At the absolute worst, they might fail to run completely, and all you have to do to fix the situation is roll back the drivers or reinstall the official ones. It’s usually worth the risk!
2. Tweak Your Card Settings
Whatever drivers you’re using, you should be able to tweak the way your GPU behaves in order to give it a virtual kick up its virtual rear.
The bottom end of this practice involves changing simple options. Lowering the overall resolution is an easy way to relieve the burden on the graphics card, and removing postprocessing effects like anti-aliasing or filtering can also have a positive effect on speed at the expense of image quality. You can get faster frame rates by disabling V-Sync, which artificially delays frames to ensure they’re displayed in tandem with the refresh rate of your monitor. The less your card has to do in general, the faster the frame-rates you can get out of it.
However, if you want your card to run faster but don’t want to sacrifice any image quality, you do have another option: you can overclock it. As with CPU overclocking, GPU overclocking is best left to experts and can damage your system if improperly applied, but it’s also a great way to ‘upgrade’ your graphics card without physically replacing it.
How you overclock your card is a delicate process to go into here, but the first port of call should be your card’s configuration software, which will allow you to change the speed of the GPU clock and memory clock (assuming it’s possible). The faster they run, the better your card’s performance should be, but increasing the speeds will also heat the GPU up, which makes it less stable. The art to overclocking is finding the point where the card is running at its fastest without becoming too unstable to play. It’s not strictly an upgrade, but it certainly feels like it!