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Quick tips on how to improve your PC's performance

Posted By: D-A-L | Date Added: 10-08-2007 02:08 PM | Views: 4191

Hi! Welcome to the first of our new multi-part series of brief articles that will show you how to clean up your PC and improve its performance. We'll be giving you inside tips on all of the checks and improvements that we carry out when we visit our UK customers for a "health check" on a desktop or laptop PC. Each week, we'll be showing you how to carry out another part of the full "health check" yourself for free!

Part 1: Performance status

Before making changes to your PC to improve performance, you need to get some benchmarks to identify whether your system's performance is lacking due to hardware or software configuration. Two of the most significant pieces of hardware inside your system that affect performance are the central processing unit (typically referred to as the 'processor' or 'CPU') and the random access memory (usually referred to as 'memory' or 'RAM'). Newer applications, Windows upgrades and updates usually require more and more RAM and faster and faster processors so it is important to know what your system has. Here is how you find out on a Windows XP, 2000, ME or 98 system:

1. Right-click on the My Computer icon on your desktop. If you don't have one there, you might find it on the Start Menu or through Windows Explorer.

2. When the context menu appears, select Properties.

3. The screen shown in Figure 1 appears and, towards the bottom-right corner, displays the processor name and speed that is being reported to Windows (in the example, the processor manufacturer and model name is an 'Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.40GHz' and it is running correctly at a reported speed of 2.40GHz. In the same area, we can also see the total amount of RAM that is being reported to Windows. I've said that it's the amount "being reported" because that is not necessarily the same as the total amount of RAM that is fitted into your system and I shall explain why shortly.

Figure 1.

Your system’s processor is often considered to be the most significant component regarding the speed of your PC. In fact, there are many other factors that make a difference. However, all other things being equal, it is true that an Intel Pentium 4 3.0 gigahertz (GHz) processor will run much faster than a 1.8GHz unit of the same type. It is a core part of everything that your system does as it processes every instruction between Windows and your hardware and handles all communications between Windows and the programs that you have open on the screen. Basically, the processor is the “interpreter” that means that pressing a key on your keyboard or moving/clicking your mouse makes things happen on the screen. If the processor is busy, instructions will be queued up. Despite the major role of the processor, upgrading a processor to a faster model is becoming increasingly uncommon as the cost of new PCs has fallen so much over recent years. Most people will be perfectly happy with the speed of their processor for 4 or 5 years and will typically only upgrade the RAM or will replace the whole PC once it becomes too slow.

Here is how you find out whether your processor is up to the job on a Windows XP or 2000 system:

4. Right-click on a blank space on the taskbar (the bar that runs across the bottom of the screen showing your currently running programs).

5. When the context menu appears (see Figure 2), select Task Manager.

Figure 2.

6. When the Task Manager screen appears, click the Performance tab (see Figure 3). The Task Manager screen always stays on top of other windows so you can now start opening and closing programs, reading emails, surfing the Internet and going about your usual tasks for 5-10 minutes in order to generate the CPU usage graph.

Figure 3.

Figure 3 shows a fairly typical CPU usage graph - the sample system has a mid-range processor which sits fairly idle at around 5% usage when I'm reading emails and web pages, spiking for just a few seconds as I open other programs or documents. If the line on your graph is usually in the top half, then that suggests that your processor is busy far too much of the time and it would be worth looking at whether any processor upgrades are available for your system.

With the Task Manager screen open on the Performance tab, you can now calculate the RAM requirement for a Windows XP or 2000 system as follows:

7. Open as many programs as you are likely to ever have open at one time. For instance, Microsoft Word or Works, Microsoft Excel, a couple of My Computer or Windows Explorer windows, your email program such as Microsoft Outlook Express, a few emails and half a dozen web browser windows (or tabs), such as Microsoft Internet Explorer.

8. Refer back to the Task Manager screen and look for the 'Total' and 'Peak' values reported in the 'Commit Charge (K)' section. If this is the hardest that your PC has been working since you switched it on, those values will be roughly the same. Divide the 'Peak' value shown in kilobytes (KB) by 1024 and this will show you the number of megabytes (MB) of memory that your system is currently trying to use. Now compare that to the 'Total' value that is shown in the 'Physical Memory (K)' section, which you also need to divide by 1024 to see the number of megabytes of RAM that is being reported to Windows. The chances are that you will see that your system is using more memory than it actually has! How is this possible? Well, when all of the RAM (the Physical Memory Total) gets used up, your PC won't simply stop or switch itself off. Instead, it will use its 'contingency plan' - it will make some temporary space on the hard disk to substitute for the extra RAM that it needs but doesn't have. This is known as 'virtual memory' and, by comparison to RAM, it is VERY slow.

9. Now close some of the applications that you opened so that what you are left with on the screen is similar to what you usually have open most of the time. Repeat step 8, comparing the 'Total' value in the 'Commit Charge (K)' section to the 'Total' value in the 'Physical Memory (K)' section. The difference between these values shows you the amount of spare RAM that is available during normal usage. If the PC is still committing more memory than it has physically available, then this means that your system is having to make do with virtual memory most of the time. That's bad news and means that it is definitely time to look at a RAM upgrade. If your system usually has a little free RAM but has to use virtual memory when it gets to peak levels (as determined in step 8), then a RAM upgrade is desirable but not essential - it is up to your judgement to decide whether it is worth spending a little of your hard-earned cash in order to keep your PC running as well as it can all of the time.

Finally, to end this topic, I need to explain what was meant by the amount of RAM "being reported" to Windows. That's not necessarily as much as the amount of RAM that you thought was fitted inside the PC. The reason for this is that some PCs do not have a separate graphics card and, instead, they have a graphics chip that is built into the system, sharing some of the RAM in order to power all the graphics on your screen. To the trained eye, this is easy to spot but, for the 'uninitiated', it requires a little explanation! If you looked at the amount of memory being reported in step 3 and found that it was a number of megabytes in a multiple of 128, e.g. 256MB, 512MB, 768MB, or that you had exactly 1GB, 1.5GB, 2GB, etc., then you probably have all of the RAM being reported to Windows because you have a separate graphics card. However, if the reported memory is one of those values minus a smaller number (typically in a multiple of 8), then some of your RAM is being shared with the graphics chip and Windows can't use it. For example, if your system shows 448MB, that means that you have 512MB RAM but 64MB is being used by the graphics chip and so only 448MB is available to Windows. This is becoming increasingly common but you should take it seriously - a system reporting 448MB RAM available does not have the same performance potential as a system that is showing the full 512MB.

I hope that you found this first part of our series on improving PC performance useful. Next week's article will be a little shorter as we will be looking at the easy but important task of keeping Windows temporary files under control.

Nathan Forrest - Future Systems (Sussex)
http://www.futuresystems-sussex.co.uk

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