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A sucker buys a new PC at the first signs of a slowdown. A savvy power user gives his aged PC a fighting chance for redemption. From tweaking your OS to compressing files to overclocking your videocard or CPU, there are plenty of ways to tune up a computer, and none require a trip to Bob’s House of New PCs. Follow along this step-by-step as we show you 21 of our favorite techniques for making a PC better, stronger, and faster — for free. These essential tweaks and tune-ups range from common-sense caretaking measures to practical adjustments that you'd be foolish to ignore. Combined, they release your PC's untapped potential and breathe new life into your system.
You know to update your antivirus definitions and run Windows Update, but did you know about that massive security hole in Acrobat 8.0 or the potential risks of running that obscure unzipping app you favor? Probably not. That’s where Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (http://secunia.com) comes in. PSI uses its massive database of security holes to monitor all the apps on your machine and let you know which ones need updating. PSI even provides a link to any available patches and is on constant vigilance for new application security holes as they arise.
Depending on the environment, you can breed an entire warren of dust bunnies inside your PC within a few months. That may sound harmless, but the build-up can easily slow or even jam the various fans in your system and impair performance. Just as you vacuum out the dust from your refrigerator’s condenser on occasion (you do that, right?), you should also clean out the dust that’s jamming the fans in your rig. A vacuum cleaner will work on the larger case fans and filters, but we shudder at the thought of capacitors being sucked off the surface of the motherboard. Instead, bring the PC outside (or inside if you don’t care about your office) and use a can of compressed air to clean out the more sensitive areas.
Some of the built-in functionality in Windows is underrated. The Disk Cleanup does a pretty handy job of wiping out junk you don’t need such as Microsoft Office temp files and old error reports. To run Disk Cleanup, open My Computer. Right-click the drive the OS is installed on and click Properties. Under the General tab, you’ll see a Disk Cleanup button. Click it and the app will run an analysis of the machine. You can dump the Downloaded Program Files, Temporary Internet Files, Offline Webpages, Microsoft Error Reporting Temporary Files, Recycle Bin, Temporary Files, Web Client/ Publisher Temporary Files, Temporary Offline Files, Offline Files, and Catalog Files for the Content Indexer with no ill effects.
It’s a known fact that hard drive performance plummets as you approach the drive’s maximum capacity. Folks with 2TB drives may never see that day, but for the peeps subsisting on a nearly full 160GB or 250GB drive, it’s a very real and performance-crippling problem. Assuming you don’t have an additional drive to move the content to, your choices are pretty slim. But before you take a machete to your files, you might want to consider simply compressing them.
We don’t mean firing up WinZip and archiving all the files—that would be too much work. Instead, use Windows’ built-in compression tool, which will make accessing the files no different than it currently is. You can access the feature by opening My Computer, right-clicking on the drive you want to compress, and selecting Properties. Click Disk Cleanup and make sure Compress Old Files is checked. Click Options and specify the age of the files you want Windows to compress. Click OK and Windows will compress only the files you haven’t accessed in more than, say, six months. Once Windows is finished compressing the files, you’ll see that the names of those files are colored blue. The names of the untouched files will appear in black.
We’ve found that with even mid-level CPUs, such as a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, the time it takes to decompress a file is minimal. For even older machines, you shouldn’t see too much of an impact as most of the files that are compressed haven’t been accessed in some time. On one of our machines, we went from 8GB free to 30GB free by compressing older files.
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