Upgrading your PC doesn’t have to cost you money. These tips will push more value from your current hardware

There are two basic ways you can upgrade a PC: you can cough up money for new gadgets to put inside it or you can squeeze every last ounce of performance out of what you’ve current got.

From my experience, few PCs are actually seriously tweaked out and running at “full crank” and if yours isn’t, you could be about to throw away hundreds of dollars needlessly when you could still extract some speed increases from the system you’ve current got. Sure, you probably won’t be able to implement all of these but if you can implement say 10 of these tips and they each give you a small 1 or 2% increase, there’s as much as 20% extra zip you’ve gained without spending a cent. That’s about the same level of extra speed you’d typically get from doing a simple but comparatively costly $300 processor upgrade.

So don’t underestimate the value of knowing how your system works and don’t fall in the trap of assuming your PC is running at full tilt, even if you only bought it last week. As I see it too many PCs end up as landfill way before their time simply through just a lack of knowledge in how to get the ultimate in PC speed. In the end, any upgrade is all about getting your system to run faster – whether you spend money doing it or not.

****UPDATE: Once you've gone through these 20 tips, read up on the next 10 in our new story Top 30 zero-cost PC upgrade tips . 

1)      Move the Windows system page file

Windows uses your hard drive as extra storage when it runs out of memory. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that if you have a second physical hard drive, you can speed up file loading by pushing the page file onto that second drive. This allows Windows to call on both drives at once, almost like a virtual RAID system.

2)      Switch off XP’s fancy look

The flashy look of Windows XP is actually an extra layer built upon Windows 2000. Dropping XP back to the basic Windows 2000/98 look will net you around 2-3% extra speed before you even try anything else. I know because I’ve benchmarked it. Click Start, then Control panel, choose System, then the Advanced tab and finally Performance Settings. When the new window comes up, click on Adjust for best performance.

3)      Use RAID 0 on your system

If you’ve got two identical hard drives in your system, have a look and see if you can hook them up in a RAID 0 or “striping” configuration. Check your motherboard manual for details. RAID 0 allows the two drives to operate as a single “superdrive”, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Well, not really but it will add some real zip to your PC. The downside to RAID 0 is that if one hard drive falls over, it effectively takes the other one with it. Physically, the second drive will be okay but all your data will have carked it. If data security is more important, try RAID1 instead. You’ll lose half your storage but you greatly reduce the chance of ever losing any of your data.

4)      Starve integrated graphics of memory

If you’re using a PC with integrated graphics on the motherboard rather than a dedicated graphics card, it’ll be stealing some of your PC’s system memory to run the graphics. This could also be the case if you’re using one of the “Turbo-cache” type graphics cards from Nvidia. Most motherboard CMOS setups will allow you to adjust how much memory is taken. If you’re running with only 256MB of RAM and currently 64MB is stolen for the graphics, dropping this down to 8MB frees up an extra 56MB for Windows and that’ll make a huge difference to the overall system application performance.

5)      Check the heatsink/fan combo

This one is for those who know how to muck around inside a computer.

Every PC uses a heatsink/fan combo unit to keep the processor cool. However, if the thermal paste between the two isn’t sufficient, the CPU could be overheating. Over time, thermal paste can dry out and become less effective. Most CPUs will drop their clock speed if they get too hot, so make sure there’s enough (not too much) grease to keep the CPU hitting those high notes.

6)      Check for dual-channel memory support

If your PC is running multiple memory modules, check to see if the motherboard supports dual-channel memory configurations. Dual-channelling enables the memory to pass through data at greater speeds, giving you extra all-round performance. You’ll need to check the motherboard manual and ensure that the memory modules are in the right memory slots on the board. If opening up a computer isn’t your thing, rope in a knowledgeable mate is knows what he’s doing.

7)      Clean your PC

Every tradesman knows that you can’t do your best work if your tools are dirty. The same thing goes for computers too. With fans running everywhere, the other thing your PC can attract besides viruses is dust. It can catch on fan blades and clog up grilles. Cleaning your PC will ensure that everything is kept cool and in tip-top condition. The cooler your PC, the faster it’ll run. A slightly moist cloth around the fan blades (obviously with the PC off and the power pulled out from the AC wall socket) will ensure that the fan is running as efficiently as possible too.

8)      Use aggressive CMOS settings

This is another one for more experienced users only.

Most motherboard CMOS or BIOS setups provide the option for managed overclocking. Just as managed funds allow you to invest in the stock market without doing it all yourself, these managed options allow you to give you PC a gentle overclocking nudge without going silly. Rather than a full-blown overclocked system, ‘aggressive settings’ tweak up the memory timings and other settings by just a couple of percentage points – enough to add a little extra speed without adding serious instability issues.

9)      Adjust the front-side bus (FSB) speed

Even if your motherboard doesn’t have these managed settings, you can still tweak your PC up a couple of percentage points by adjusting the front-side bus. Now this is starting to get into serious overclocking territory and you should never jump in too far and push the FSB too high, otherwise you may cause your PC to crash. As a guide, most PCs should be able to handle a 1 or 2% increase in the FSB without too many troubles although there’ll no doubt be the odd system that won’t. We’d recommend this for experienced users only but it can make a difference.

10)  Look for multicore-enabled applications

If you’re like us, you use plenty of freeware applications. However, if you have a HyperThreaded or multi-core processor such as a Core 2 Duo or Athlon64 X2 chip, keep an eye out for multi-core enabled versions of your favourite tools. Updated versions can often perform 20-30% faster than previous releases, particularly audio and video apps.

This is particularly true of the latest SVN releases of the command line audio-video conversion tool, FFmpeg. Compared to earlier versions, MPEG2 encoding speeds can as much as double on a dual-core processor by simply updating the FFMPEG command line tool.

11)  Run fewer apps at the same time

If your PC is short of memory (anything less than 512MB) and you’re running Windows XP, try running fewer apps at the same time. The more apps you run, the more Windows has to keep swapping them in and out of real memory and onto the page file on the hard drive. While it means Windows can run with less physical memory, it slows the whole system down while it swaps the data. So if you’re not really using an app, close it down.

12)  Turn off hard drive power-down

Many notebook PCs will use power management techniques on the hard drive, turning it off if it hasn’t been used in a specific time frame. These are often used even with you’re using AC mains power. Switching this off will ensure the hard drive delivers the data when you need it to and that’ll help maximise the whole system’s performance.

13)  If it’s charged, pull it out

The recent Sony battery debacle is a good reminder to us all that Lithium-ion batteries are not perfect but you can potentially save some hassles if you remove the battery from the notebook once it’s fully charged and running on AC mains power. Lithium-ion batteries get hot while they’re charging and can stay quite warm even afterwards. That helps heat up the rest of the notebook and possible make it run not as efficiently as it could. UPDATE: The downside to this is that if the AC power goes off all of a sudden, your notebook will switch off immediately, which may mean you losing your work. If power loss is a likely thing in your area, keeping the battery in will act as a battery backup so if the power is lost, your work won't be.

Pulling it out will ensure it can’t do you or your notebook any damage.

14)  Drop the screen resolution

If your PC is starting to drag a bit, try dropping the screen resolution a notch. If it’s set to 1280x1024-pixels, try 1024x768-pixels instead. I’ve found over the last ten years that even on standard applications, you can gain a nice little speed increase. The less pixels the PC has to write to, the faster it can get on with processing your applications. We’ve known this for ages on 3D gaming but it actually occurs, to a much less degree of course, on normal Windows applications as well.

15)  Find faster video codecs

Some older PCs may have trouble playing back high-definition television (HDTV) video. If you’ve found yours is having that trouble, despite using the latest XviD or DivX codecs, try using FFDshow. This combo pack of super-efficient codecs is faster than many of the originals it emulates, enough to make my old 2GHz Pentium 4-M notebook go from a stuttering mess on HDTV playback to being as smooth as silk.

You can download FFDshow from here .

16)  Get the latest device drivers

This sounds like another obvious one but don’t be fooled into thinking everyone already knows it. I’ve seen commercially available PCs from local PC vendors in just the last three months who supply Nvidia and ATI graphics cards with the default driver software that comes with Windows Vista – a recipe for 3D gaming disaster if ever there was one. Downloading the latest device drivers – and we’re not just talking graphics cards either – can often fix bugs and improve performance. This can be true of motherboard device drivers too.

17)  Patch your IDE drives

Systems that are still running the original version of Windows 2000 are likely to be missing out quite a bit of performance. That’s because Microsoft only shipped it with ATA-66 support for IDE hard drives. You can download a patch from http://tinyurl.com/ye3yvu that’ll get your ATA100 and ATA133 hard drives cranking at full tilt. Updating to Service Pack 4 will also fix this issue.

18)  Defrag your hard drive

Most people like to give their house a spring clean each year, just to get rid of the clutter and gain back some living space. Your PC’s hard drive is the same and a defrag can fix all those broken file links and clogged up data sludge that will inevitably slow down any PC. Microsoft often recommends you back up your files first, just in case the defrag process goes wrong but it can make a serious difference to the time Windows takes to find and open up your files.

19)  Get the latest motherboard BIOS updates

This is one for the serious experienced users only but keeping up with the latest BIOS updates for your PC’s motherboard can not only make some improvements to performance but can also fix up glitches not found in the original BIOS releases. I don’t think I’ve seen a motherboard in the last 12 years that hasn’t had at least three updates in its life so check the web page of yours for the latest. They can even make it possible for older boards to run the latest processors in some cases.

20)  Reinstall Windows

This is really only for those with time on their hands but there is no better way of ensuring that Windows is running efficiently as reinstalling Windows. No matter how vigilant you are about downloading demos or using the internet, Windows always seems to get itself in a right knot with bits of files all over the place. Back up your data, reformat the hard drive, reinstall Windows, your device drivers and applications and you’ll be surprised at just how much faster the whole system runs. I reinstall Windows on my PCs every 12 months – it’s long enough not to become a completely regular nightmare and enough time that you shouldn’t trigger problems with Microsoft’s Windows activation.