3 ways to significantly boost the performance of your machine

Nobody likes waiting for their computers to load files or boot up, we all want our machines as fast and optimized as possible. Below are 3 ways you can significantly boost the performance of your machine.

Upgrade your HDD into an SSD

You can upgrade your slow hard disk drive (HDD) into a faster solid-state drive (SSD). The reason solid state drives are much faster than hard disk drives is because there are no moving parts and they use NAND flash memory cells to quickly send,receive and store data. However hard disk drives use magnetic material called platters which are arranged in cocentric circles and divided up into sectors, this means a physical read head (similiar to that of a record player) has to physically move and read the data. 

• Advantages you will instantly notice from upgrading:
• Longer battery life as they draw less battery which also results in little heat
• Significantly faster boot time
• As there are no moving parts there is no noise or vibration
• The rate of failure is much lower and no risk of corruption due to magnetism
• Your file copying/write/read speed can be increased by up to  1100% and file opening speed increased by up to 30%

Clean your computer, both in terms of hardware and software

Computers naturally accumulate dust, however this can wear down your pc and give you noticeable performance issues. This is because dust can block the fans inside your computer and stop the airflow, as a result your computer components will have less air directed to them and get much hotter; this leads to your CPU having to throttle down your componenents and have them work less. If you have a lot of dust in your computer this could get even worse, the dust could get deep enough and actually insulate components in your computer which could result in permeanant damage.

Other than physically cleaning your computer you can also clean and organize the software side to boost performance. Things like removing unused programs, unused files and stopping programs automatically launching on startup can make small differences. To get large differences you can clean your drive aswell as defragment it. As previously mentioned, hard disk drives have a read head to try to locate the data on a drive but by defragmentating it, it allows all the relevant data to be nearby to each other and the read head has less travel time, therefore boosting your peformance. Other things you should make sure to do regularly include scanning for malware and viruses, cleaning your browser and updating all your software.

Upgrade your RAM and your operating system

Other than just regularly checking that there are no general upgrades for your computer, it is also worth checking that you have the latest windows version or mac version (Windows 10 and MacOS 10.12 Sierra ). Another thing to check if you're a Windows user is that you have the 64-bit version and not the 32-bit version, by having the 64-bit version this allows you to be able to use more than 4gb of RAM and increases the word size for the address and data bus inside your computer - essentially doubling your speeds. To also improve your general productivity and peformance it may be worth upgrading the amount of RAM you have in your computer, this will allow you to multitask better and increase the speeds of using many applications. This is because if you use up all your RAM, the hard drive is then used as virtual memory to act as RAM; however this is slower than actual RAM. So by increasing your RAM capacity you have less chance of filling it up and having to resort to using the slower virtual memory.

These are some of the best things you can do to make sure your computer is at its peak performance, if you need assistance in optimizing your computer and making it as powerful as possible? Speak to us on 0330 1223 4220 or arrange a meeting to discuss discuss the best option for you!