Best things you have done to better your computers performance

For me, upgrading from 512mb ram to 1.5gb total (soon to be 2GB total) and cleaning out the fans (first time since computer was bought) increased performance and lowered temperatures and noise.

What have you done?

 

I put together a little Tweaks thread through the assistance of many here that seems to work ok. Its getting around 1500 hits a day and makes your laptop a speedy little devil. Its hyperlink is below my sig block.

With respect to hardware, however, the SSD creates a whole new environment. Flash!!!!!

 

I would say adding memory, It really made a difference for me.

 

adding the 2GB for my notebook made a big difference. i tried running Vista Ultimate with 1GB and it worked pretty well (turned off a bunch of useless processes and vista programs) but my gaming ability was severely limited. so i decided to upgrade early and it made a good amount of difference

as for my desktop, it's pretty outdated (Athlon XP, 1GB ram, FX5200) but i oc'ed the cpu and graphics to squeeze out a bit more fps in my games. other than that, the occassional cleaning of the dust inside the case.

 

The best thing I did for my computer was "downgrade" from Vista

 

For my laptop it has been a clean install and adding 1 gig for a total of 1.5 gigs.
For my desktop which is also outdated (Athlon XP 3000 Radeon X850 Pro 1 GIG Windows XP) was a clean install a graphics card and a new dustless case

 

Adding 7200RPM drives to the X300 & M65. I had the 60GB already so I just put it in the X300, and I bought the 200GB for the M65 to replace the 80GB 5400RPM that came with it. One thing, though, the X300 is pretty warm. (HD runs at 45C or so and can really be felt on right palmrest and bottom.)

I'll be putting a T7600 in the M65 within the next week or so. Just can't leave well enough alone.

But enough RAM, as noted, is always Step 1.

 

Gutted a dead Voodoo Rage desktop, and installed into a week old eMachines T5062: 420W PSU, video card, firewire card, 80GB Raptor. Added a second stick of RAM (2 GB total), then Dbanned the drive and installed Ubuntu.

 

I install Gentoo... And it does speed things up.

 

On a brand new notebook with Vista Home Premium I immediately:

1) upgraded RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB
2) reinstalled OS minus all factory included apps (ie bloatware)
3) disabled Windows Search
4) disabled System Restore
5) disabled Remote Differential Compression under Windows features

System is running nice and fast now.

 

You want speed,
get a tyan socket 940 motherboard, install 16GB minimum of ECC memory, 4 Opteron 880's, and 16 15,000rpm 73GB rpm Hitachi ultrastar HDD's.

If you want power, get a Voodoo

K-TRON

 

Already tried that, still too slow.

 

Lies, if you want power get a asus c90 if you want to waist alot of money and spend the rest of your life trying to find excuses to convice yourself you didnt. Get a Voodoo

 

thank god im not a very big hardcore gamer casue i would be broke and besides i dont got the money for exspensive stuff like that. this laptop that i just bought would most likely will not have an upgrade in any hardware, except a new battery when the time comes.

 

If you want to spend too much money for an overrated machine with a pretty paint job, get a Voodoo.

 

For this machine (in sig), doing a clean install of Vista.

Overall, upgrading from 512 MB to 1 GB RAM on my 2003 desktop. Cleaning it for the first time after four years also significantly helped the thermal situation.

 

Increasing MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server for IE. It makes a night and day difference in page loads.

Go to: current user/software/microsoft/windows/current version/internet settings. Create two new dwords, name them as above, and give them a decimal value of 10 or more. I use 24. Using too large of a number will cause some pages to drop content.

 

Can you explain that better??? The performance gain??

 

Id be willing to use that IE thing if you told us what it actually does. Sounds like it mjust allows more connections at once , Can you explain it?

 

Sure.

By default, Internet Explorer only uses 4 connections at a time. A new server connection must be opened, download performed, and closed for each element of a webpage. With a default limit of just 4 simultaneous connections much of these elements, which can number in the hundreds on some pages, are forced to be loaded in series, rather than in parallel; with a great deal of open connection then close connection overhead that must be waited for before the next tiny little element can be loaded.

It doesn't do anything for large file downloads. It makes a very noticable difference in browsing though.

 

Here is a link to one of numerous articles describing all the why and how. This one covers IE, Firefox, and Opera. Opera being the only one with high connection setting by default, hence why many may "feel" Opera is so fast. The tweak is fortunately available for every browser flavor.

Connection Instructions

The IE registry settings have to be done for each user if you have multiple user accounts.