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simple tweaks to improve performance on an older pc


Before you spend on costly performance upgrades, try these tweaks that promise to turn your aging beige box into a digital hotrod!

 1. Boost Memory Speed

 Being one of the major bottlenecks in overall performance, a slight boost in memory speed can have a deciding effect on how peppy your PC is. In most modern motherboards, you can adjust the system memory frequency accordingly. Most graphics-intensive software and applications show some increase in performance just by using quicker memory. You can squeeze your system's memory for more juice by lowering the time it takes to respond. Proceed to the Advanced Chipset option and try decreasing Latency Time of RAM.

 2. Understand the Cache

 A cache, in computer terms, is nothing more than a digital scratchpad used for storing frequently accessed information. It works the same way as memory does, but its lightning fast speed set it so apart, they had to change its name. A CPU sports a dedicated cache where it jots down its calculations. If you take away its cache, then the CPU reverts to RAM, with a performance hit so incredible you'll undergo a first hand feel of its significance. Again proceed to the Advanced Chipset entry and look for options. Most PCs can safely run this tweak for a small performance increase.

 3. Accelerating AGP

 Enable AGP 4x (under Advanced Chipset option) to increase the amount of throughput from your graphics card. This will result in higher graphics performance. Revert to the original settings if you
see stray pixels and torn images. Save memory space and processing power by balancing the amount of system memory needed to store graphical textures. For this, increase the aperture size.

 4. Adjust Colour Depth

 The more colour you use, the more processing power will it take to render 3D scenes. If the only thing that matters to you is speed and more speed, you'll find that the maximum benefit lies in switching to lower-bit colour mode in all the games that you play.

 5. Install Motherboards Drivers

 More than being just functional patches, driver updates for motherboards can deliver rather large jumps in system performance, especially if the drivers contain fixes for major issues. Irrespective of which chipset your motherboard is based upon, there are a few thumb rules for optimizing driver-related settings for peak performance. Before installing a fresh set of new drivers, uninstall the existing set, ensuring that there is no trace of the old files. The same goes for video cards and sound cards too. When you install an updated driver set, pay close attention to the steps you have to go through. For instance, while installing a file, select the choice which reads 'High Performance'. Remember, the decision you make in each of those installation steps will have an influence on how fast your computer system runs.

 6. Start-Up Options 

 Let's get right down to the beginning. The first method by which you can get Windows to load faster is by streamlining the startup process. In older PCs, launch the System Configuration Editor and look for the windows that are named C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT and C:\CONFIG.SYS. Wipe out the contents of each window and save them once you're through. Revert to C:\CONFIG.SYS and add the line:
Stacks=0,0.

 7. Go Retro

 We know how it feels not to have brilliant sounds and a visually appealing desktop while you work. But these things take up precious time, which could be used towards other, more important tasks. Start by disabling system sounds. To do this, go to Sound settings in the Control Panel and disable system sounds. This will add plenty of zip to your PC and even more so if you are stuck with an extremely slow one. If you have a large, high-resolution desktop background installed, throw that out too and you'll be freeing up a good chunk of system memory.

 8. Enable Direct Memory Access

 DMA's benefits are two-fold. Firstly, it allows the hard disk direct access to system memory, and secondly, by circumventing the CPU, lesser time is consumed in getting the data transferred. Hard disks and optical units can benefit from using DMA. To enable it, go to the 'Device Manager', make the necessary changes and restart the system for the changes to take effect. Note that this only works for drives that have DMA capability.

 9. Tweak the BIOS

 Tired of a BIOS that won't let you tweak your machine for maximum performance? Don't let that get your hopes down. Use a good BIOS tweaking utility that lets you tune just about every component of your PC without the need to reboot every time you make changes. Just make sure you choose an application that supports a vast majority of BIOS versions and chipsets, giving you more control.

 With the above tweaks, you will be on your way to a highly tweaked, high-performance PC.

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