by Lon Elliott

Created on: February 11, 2009

Would you drive fifteen thousand miles on your car without changing your oil? For most of us the answer is no. Your home computer should be put in the same category. Sadly most do not realize that your computer needs maintenance done routinely to keep it operating at its best.

Before you delve into what you should do for your computer though, you should ask a very simple question of yourself. The answer must be honest though to get the most of your computer. What do you use your computer for? Email, surfing the Internet, video editing, each of these things requires different hardware and software for your computer. The different hardware and software will decide how and what you need to do for you computer.

To speed up your computer, you can break it down into two categories. Hardware and software. Each can net great gains for speed and reliability on your home computer. Lets discuss hardware first.

There are several quick and easy things you can do for your computer when it comes to hardware.

First, the amount of ram you have is critical. Its often referred to as the poor mans speed boost. If you do not have enough ram for your computer, it forces your computer to use its hard drive as a temporary ram called a page file. This slows things down tremendously. For todays computing 4 GB of ram is normally more than enough and can be bought pretty cheaply.

Second, examine your video card. If you play games do video editing or things of that nature, this will give you a huge bang for the buck. You want to look for a video card that has as much on board ram as your willing to pay for. This does two things for you. The video processing uses a much faster ram located on the video card, and is accessed quicker. Next, it takes the load of video processing off of your main processor and speeds up things very nicely. You can get a great mid range card today for under one hundred dollars.

Third, any load you can take off of your processor will help. Meaning that a cheap investment in a sound card will then take the load of sound processing off of your main chip allowing it to do other tasks. You can purchase a decent sound card for under forty dollars.

Last, you can change the processor if you would like and have the know how. Its not very complicated but it can be expensive if you go high end. You can perform the first three tasks and spend less than what you might on a decent processor.

Now lets discuss different software things you can do to speed up your machine.

First and foremost,

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>