PC Tips for improving performance by tweaking your hardware

Learn how your hard drive and graphics card impact your system’s performance, and dig deep under the bonnet to discover and fix hardware issues. In previous guides we have looked at improving your system’s performance by simply removing unwanted programs. The next area we want to understand is the impact your hard drive and graphics card have on your system.

Before we start examining your computer, we need to see what Windows Vista believes is possible from the system when it’s working at its best. Searching for ‘Performance’ in Start Search should lead you to the Performance Information and Tools analysis of your system. If any numbers are low, then you may wish to consider looking at these areas for replacement. My laptop has a lowest rating of 4.3, which is more than adequate, but should one number be low compared to the rest, I would consider replacing that element. If your computer is running low on RAM, for example, it will use the hard drive as an extension of memory, but this deals a fatal blow to your computer’s performance because the hard drive can be 1,000 times slower than memory. In my experience, a Windows Vista PC with just 1GB of memory will struggle unless your system is only lightly used.

Other hard drive problems can be caused by fragmented files. To see if your computer is suffering from this, fire up the Reliability and Performance Monitor. While this is very useful to explore, we will concentrate on the Disk section. If you open this and sort by Response Time, you can see how long some of your disk operations take. The higher the number here, the more your hard drive is being stretched. Should you see numbers above 500ms (0.5 seconds), you need to defragment your drive or add more computer memory.

You can use Task Managerto look for processes that use up a lot of your CPU’s processing power. Sometimes a disk-intensive process will show light processor usage in Task Manager, while slowing the system down through intensive hard drive access, so you need to check both tools to understand what is slowing your system down. Use Task Manager to identify any programs that are doing this. This will either point to a need to defragment the hard drive or add more memory. If this file is the Pagefile.sys file, then it is a strong probability that more memory is needed. The need for programs to access the hard drive will never go away, but a slow system with a constantly illuminated drive light always points to too much hard disk usage.

Once we have tuned the most common areas of the system, we then move on to an area that Windows Vista has stretched far more than Windows XP – the graphics card. While previously the graphics card was only stretched with gaming, it is used extensively by the Windows Aero graphics and now needs to be examined. Aero graphics hit the computer in two areas – memory and GPU (graphics processing unit) performance. To see how much memory is being demanded by Aero, look at Task Manager and search for the process dwm.exe – the memory used by this process is the memory used for Aero. Aero can also cause problems with the PC’s ability to render the screen in a timely process.

There are two tests you can take to see if the graphics card is holding back your system. The first is to switch off the full Aero experience in Windows Color and Appearence. Click on the link to open the Classic appearence properties and select Windows Vista Basic. If this makes your computer more responsive, then your graphics card is causing a problem.

The second test is to run a winsat command that stresses your system and checks to see that it runs adequately. A sample command might be ‘winsat d3d -totalobj 20 -objs C(20) -totaltex 10 -texpobj C(1) -alushader -v -width 1000 -height 750′, with the width and height numbers being adjusted to something close to your screen settings. If this is jerky, then again your graphics card is showing itself as not being great for Windows Vista.

Extreme performance analysis tools
Use the most detailed analysis tools to diagnose performance issues.

1. PERFORMANCE TOOLKIT Download and install the Windows Performance Toolkit from snipurl.com/281w4 to enable the tools that hardware providers and engineers use to diagnose deep system issues.

2. TRACING CHARACTERISTICS You need to start a trace. Begin with the command “xperf -on DiagEasy -f\trace.etl” which needs to be run from a command prompt that was started as an Administrator. Now do the things that cause your system to underperform.

3. STOP TRACE While the trace was running, you will have collected a number of statistics on your system while it was not performing as desired. You now need to stop the trace with the command “xperf-d \ final_trace.etl”, from the same command prompt as before.

4. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS The final trace file can now be loaded and examined. You will notice that the initial screen shows all the activity that was taking place on your system.

5. EXPLORE PROBLEM AREAS Now the detective work comes in. When you see a place with lots of disk or CPU activity, hover your mouse over it to see what caused it. For a more detailed view, select a region and choose Zoom or Details from the menu.

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PC Tips for Turning your PC into a Super Computer

What, exactly, are supercomputers? The clue is in the name, really: they’re powerful computers capable of calculating many millions of floating operations per second (FLOPS) essentially, they’re very, very fast.

While any array of powerful computers, such as a modern-day web server which consists of several motherboards (the main circuit board of a computer) running in parallel can be considered a supercomputer, generally the term is reserved for machines that dedicate their entire hardware to one complex task at any given time.

Take the NEC Earth Simulator in Japan, for example, which was created specifically for modelling weather problems associated with global warming. Or the world’s fastest computer, BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, which simulates the behaviour of biomolecular structures and protein folding. It’s capable of 600 trillion FLOPS (tera-FLOPS or TFLOPS), whereas, the six-year-old Earth Simulator is only capable of 36TFLOPS. BlueGene/L won’t hold the top spot for long, though. Supercomputers twice as powerful will be online soon.

Even though you might not realise it, your Windows Vista PC isn’t all that far removed from the world’s most powerful computers. A modern CPU is only capable of 30 million FLOPS (giga-FLOPS) but supercomputers comprise large numbers of desktop components running in parallel for the greatest computational throughput. Here’s how to get closer to the supercomputer potential of your PC…

1. Go Quad-Core

A supercomputer is simply lots of standard CPUs running in unison, so add more CPUs by swapping a single or dual-core processor for a quad-core one. Underneath the big fan in the centre of your motherboard, a single clip holds the processor in place. It can easily be undone and a new chip slotted in.

The tricky part is making sure a new processor fits your motherboard. You can find this out by visiting the manufacturer’s website you may need to upgrade the BIOS for the latest chips.

You won’t notice a huge difference in games, but switching between desktop applications or watching movies will be speedier.

2. Speed up your graphics card

If you want faster frame rates in games, you could try overclocking your graphics card – making it run faster than the manufacturer originally specified. The first thing to do is find out what sort of graphics card you’re running. You can do this by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Personalize > Display Settings. You should see a pull-down menu that says something like ‘Generic PnP Monitor on…’ – the text that follows tells you what your graphics hardware is.

If you have an Intel graphics accelerator, then your best option is to upgrade the card completely (see number 8). If your graphics hardware says ‘GeForce’ or ‘Radeon’, then the chances are you can overclock your card using utilities built into the drivers.

If it’s a GeForce card (made by NVIDIA), go to www.nvidia.com/object/ntune and download the nTune software. AMD cards(marked Radeon) have a utility called Overdrive in the Control Panel – both of these allow you to overclock your hardware.

Now right-click on the desktop and select the NVIDIA or AMD Control Panel option, then go to the nTune or Overdrive tabs on the left. You can change the clock speeds of your graphics processor and memory core, but beware the faster you go, the more chance there is that they’ll overheat and crash your system.

3. Fit more memory

Generally speaking, if you’ve got 1GB or less of system memory then the best way to speed up Windows Vista is to add more.

You can find out how much memory your PC has by going to Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Welcome Center. An overview of your hardware at the top of the window will include an amount of RAM (Random Access Memory). For the best performance in Windows Vista, you’ll need at least 2GB of RAM.

Adding RAM is easy it comes in long sticks, which simply plug into the sockets beside your CPU on the motherboard. You must get the right kind of RAM for your motherboard though most PCs use DDR2 – as the wrong kind won’t fit. Computer Memory is rated by size (in GB) and speed (in MHz), and for the most benefit must be fitted in matched pairs (two sticks that are the same) in dual channel slots on the motherboard.

The slot pairings are usually colour coded, so you should make sure you put identical memory in the two blue slots or the two black slots, for example.

4. Switch to hi-def

Whether it’s a web download or Blu-ray movie, decoding high-definition video requires a lot of processing power, and if you’re getting choppy playback then your CPU is struggling.

Rather than replace your main processor, new AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards have built-in tools for taking the load off of the CPU during video playback. Look for either the GeForce 8xxx or Radeon HD ranges the lower end cards sell for less than £50 and have the same hardware tweaks for decoding HD video as the most expensive. They won’t be great for playing games, but should turn your PC into a super media centre.

5. Improve your cooling

When computer parts get hot, they run more slowly. And conversely, the faster they run, the hotter they get. If you’re going to be tweaking the clock speeds of your PC to speed it up, chances are you’ll need to improve the cooling inside your case. Even on a standard machine, you’d be surprised by how many crashes or lock-ups are due to undetected overheating.

The simplest way to improve cooling is to fit extra case fans. Quiet PC (www.quietpc.co.uk) has a selection of dampened fans that won’t cost much more than a tenner. These either clip on to or screw into spare spaces inside your case, or replace the fans you have. Normal case fans are 8cm in diameter, but larger fans move more air around and can spin more slowly – if your case will take them, consider upgrading to 12cm fans all round.

“The worst thing,” says Quiet PC’s Paul Lee, “is buying a shiny new CPU cooler only to find out that it doesn’t fit your motherboard. Here at Quiet PC we try to provide as much compatibility information as possible, and we’re only a phone call away.”

6. Speed up your processor

Perhaps the most extreme way to turn your PC into a supercomputer is to overclock it. Simply put, this means increasing the clock speeds of various components beyond the manufacturers’ original settings. It’s not as dangerous as you might think, though: many motherboards are guaranteed to run at enhanced speeds, and today’s processors are very robust when it comes to accelerating them.

The speed of a CPU is derived from a multiple of either the Front Side Bus on an Intel system, or of the Hypertransport clock in an AMD one. The easiest way to overclock your processor is to increase these base speeds. Many motherboards come with a Windows Vista utility for this Asus AI is a good example. If you don’t have a piece of software, though, you’ll need to make some BIOS changes. See tinyurl.com/2tyljj for how to do this.

7. Free up system resources

The more programs you try to run at any one time, the slower your computer will be. There are many programs that run in the background all the time and these aren’t immediately apparent on your desktop. Some of them are essential to the operation of Windows Vista, but many especially third-party ones – are not. “No matter how fast or shiny computers are when they’re new,” says Microsoft’s official advice page at tinyurl.com/29t5am, “they all seem to get slower over time.” To free the supercomputer within, you’ll need to pare these background programs back to a minimum. Start Windows Defender (Control Panel > Programs > Windows Defender) and select Tools > Software Explorer. This application will let you prevent services loading when the PC boots – simply disable those you don’t need. If you turn one off and your PC starts having problems, simply turn it back on again in the same screen.

8. Upgrade your graphics card

“If you require more frames per second from a game,” says Paul Lee from Quiet PC, “then upgrading the graphics card is your best option.” If your processor is less than a year old, it’s probably OK with modern game engines. Many new PCs, though, are sold with low-end graphics cards.

Have a look at the Windows Experience Index for your PC. Are the graphics scoring low? For less than £150 you can buy a top-notch GeForce 8800GT or Radeon HD3870 3D card with 512MB of memory. This fits into the long PCI Express x16 slot on your motherboard. It’s usually the top expansion port below the CPU fan. Fitting a new graphics card is easy: check out our guide at tinyurl.com/27ek5r.

9. Enable advanced hard drive performance

Increase the speed at which your hard drive loads program data to the system memory with one simple tweak but be warned, it does mean disabling certain settings that store information. If your PC crashes, you’re at more risk of losing data than if it crashes normally.

Open the Control Panel and navigate to System and Maintenance > System and choose Device Manager. Click on the plus sign next to Disk Drives, and select your hard drive. Right-click on it and choose Properties.

Under the Policies tab, you’ll find a check box for Enable Advanced Performance. Turn this on and click OK.

10. Join the grid

If you decide you can’t turn your own PC into a supercomputer, why not turn it into a small part of a much, much bigger one? There are several ‘grid’ computing initiatives which take the time your PC sits idle and puts it to good use, working on calculations for cancer research or analysing radio waves from outer space.

The most popular way to do this is to sign up for BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). At any one time, BOINC routines can have enough computers contributing to break the 1,000TFLOPS, or penta-FLOPS, barrier. To offer your computer’s services, download the software from boinc.berkeley.edu and choose which projects you’d like your PC to contribute to. While the screen saver runs you could be fighting climate change or simulating the effectiveness of anti-malaria drugs.

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PC Tips for Your PC Handling Vista

Our first article about configuring AMD and Intel PCs within a budget of $300 made it clear that systems in this price range are suitable for everyday computing tasks. We equipped our Celeron and Sempron test systems with a fast and affordable 160-GB hard drive and one gigabyte of RAM, and the systems did a great job in Windows XP. But how do they perform with Windows Vista? And do you really know how your PC would perform with Vista?

Microsoft has created two certification logos to help customers choose the right components for their Windows Vista PC. There is “Vista Ready” and “Vista Premium Ready.” If all of your components carry one of the logos, you should be able to at least run Vista properly; if you purchase high-end products you should be ready for the Premium and Ultimate editions as well. However, many products, especially older ones, do not carry any logo to indicate Vista readiness. The reason for purchasing hardware usually isn’t a particular operating system, but an application or specific requirement such as more storage capacity, more RAM or a faster platform. We normally assume that the latest OS will work on hardware that we’re going to buy from retail.

But what do you do if you follow the Vista upgrade path to find out that the fancy new operating system doesn’t work well, or doesn’t even work on your rig at all? Since the update versions of Vista require a working Windows XP installation to execute (the DVDs aren’t bootable), you can at least be sure that your XP product key will still work when stepping back to use good ole’ Windows XP. But you will not be able to install your Vista Update on another machine. This is why we advise against purchasing update versions, although this installation path seems to be more convenient at first. The retail versions are more expensive, but you can keep using Windows XP on one machine while running Windows Vista on another.

But we don’t want the trial and error method. One way to be sure whether or not your system is ready for Vista is checking the manufacturer’s Website. You can look for information regarding your system, or collect information on the individual components, but this is cumbersome. The other way is checking Microsoft’s list of links to manufacturer information about CPU and graphics processor capabilities. Lastly, a smooth way of determining whether Vista will work is Microsoft’s Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. This is a utility that runs under Windows XP and the simple editions of Windows Vista.

We still have our $300 PCs at hand, so we decided to see how they ran Vista. We did not run application benchmarks since they wouldn’t differ very much from the results under Windows XP. Instead, the focus is the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, Vista AeroGlass capabilities and the Windows Vista Experience Index.

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PC Tips for Changing Windows XP Virtual Memory Size

The virtual memory is a portion of your hard disk that acts as RAM memory when your Random Access Memory(RAM) is full.

The downside is that is much slower because the access time is determined by the hard disk’s speed. But you need it for those days when you use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, editing a movie and converting some sound files so here is how you can change it.

Important: The virtual memory size must be fixed in order to prevent windows from fragmenting your hard disk. Why? Because when windows virtual memory is full windows will take some more space from your hard disk.

So fix the memory size a little higher but set the minimum and the maximum at the same fixed size, 2 gb(this works for me). This way windows will have a fixed size to work with and will stop fragmenting your hard disk.

1. Click Start, right click on My Computer and then click Properties
2. Click ” Advanced “.
3. At the ” Performance ” section click ” Settings ” .
4. Select ” Advanced ” and in the ” Virtual Memory ” click ” Change ” .
5. Here, Click on your Windows Partition, select ” Custom Size ” and set the Initial Size and Maximum Size to 2000(2gb). Click ” Set ” .
6. Click Ok and restart your Computer.

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This a PC Tips for fixing a bad sector on your harddisk :

1: Double-click on “My Computer”.
2: Select the disk/partition that you want to diagnose and repair.
3: Right click on the disk/partition you selected and click on “Properties”
4: Choose the “Tools” tab.
5: Click the “Check Now” button under “Error Checking Status”.
6: Depending on your type of Windows, choose “Thorough” or “Scan for and Attempt Recovery of Bad Sectors.”
7: Click Start.

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