Free performance increase for your computer or laptop

Ok, this is one of my favourite and and often-used tips to squeeze that extra bit of power out of your system. It's just a couple of simple system changes that will make your windows open quicker and generally improve the day-to-day performance of your computer. This works on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

Right-click 'My computer', and on the pop-up menu left-click 'Properties'. This opens the System Properties window, which can also be opened by double-clicking 'System' in the control panel. The first thing to do is note the amount of RAM in your system, which should be displayed on the 'General' tab of System Properties nearly at the bottom of the window under the heading 'Computer'. Write down the amount of RAM in your system, you will need this later. Now in System Properties click on the Advanced tab. Under the 'Performance' heading, click Settings, which will open the 'Performance Settings' window (remember how you got here - you will need to open it again later). Now on Visual Effects, click to select the 'Adjust for best performance' radio button. Now click Apply. After a few seconds, you will notice the appearance of your task bar and windows will change. This reduces the amount of memory required to render your desktop and open windows, thereby increasing the amount of free memory available for other things, and speeding up the time it takes to open a new window. If you like it better the other way you can change it back to 'Let windows choose what's best for my computer', or for the not-faint-of-heart, you can select 'Custom' and tweak the options to your heart's content.

Now moving on to virtual memory settings. First, open 'Performance Settings' again (refer to the above steps for how to get there). From here we want to click the 'Advanced' tab, then down at the bottom of this window, under 'Virtual memory' click 'Change'. Make sure your system drive (usually C:) is selected above, and then click to select the 'Custom size' radio button. This is where you will need to know the amount of RAM you have (if you remember, you should have noted this earlier in the first step above). I recommend you set the custom virtual memory to somewhere between 2 and 4 times the amount of RAM you have in your system. So, if you have 1GB of RAM, set the virtual memory to 2000MB or 4000MB. Also, make sure you set the initial size and the maximum size to the same value. What this does is it causes the operating system to allocate a fixed amount of disk space for the virtual memory, which saves the time that it would otherwise take increasing the page file size when more virtual memory is needed, and then decreasing it again when the usage drops. The only problem with doing this occurs when you are low on disk space. You will need as much free space on your hard drive as the amount of memory you allocate to virtual memory, and this space on your hard drive will become unusable and so it will appear as though you have that much less free space on your drive. With modern computers we're seeing hard drives of 160GB, 250GB, 320GB and above and for these systems with general use there should be lots of free space on the hard drive. However, with older systems (which generally will see improved performance more using this trick), unfortunately the hard drives are often smaller (80GB, 60GB, 40GB, and perhaps less, depending on how old the computer is) and you may be running low on free space. If this is the case, your system will most likely improve greatly with a hard drive and/or memory upgrade. After you've set your initial and max virtual memory sizes, click the Set button, then Ok, and then on the window behind click Apply and Ok. That's it, your system should be that bit quicker now. You may need to restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

I really hope these little tricks prove useful to you. As always, please feel free to comment or contact me through my website if you have any questions or if there is anything I can do to help.

Yours,

Sean Loewen
Owner
The PC GP Computer Services

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