Trying to do what I can with what I’ve got

// May 18th, 2009 // Geeky Stuff, General

This “Phone or PC” debate has been pissing me right off, because I can’t decide on which one to go for. So, tonight I thought I would do what I could with my PC to see if I can speed it up without spending a penny. This is what I’ve done:

Overclocked the CPU

It has been said that the motherboard I have has excellent overclocking potential, but I’ve had the set up for about three years or so and never overclocked it… ever! So I’ve been tweaking it tonight, and managed to get another 500Mhz out of it! Now, each core of the CPU is running at 2.25Ghz and is nice and stable.

Added half a gig of RAM

I had a look in my old server computer casing and discovered that it ran on DDR RAM… 1Gb of it to be exact! There was one 512Mb stick, and two 256Mb sticks, so I took the biggest one and put it in my PC, increasing the RAM to 2.5Gb. I also gave my folks a call to see if they had any DDR RAM lying around that they weren’t using (because their computers have DDR2, they can’t use it) and they said they had 2x 1Gb of it they could give me. Because of the RAM that I have already (1x 1Gb and 3x 512Mb), this will give me another 1Gb of RAM to work with because they’d be replacing 512Mb ones. I’ll be getting these from my folks in a little over a month.

Uninstalled unnecessary programs

There were a few programs I had installed that I don’t use anymore. I got shot of them!

Disabled the on-board graphics

Since I have a dedicated graphics card, the on-board one was just sat there doing nothing, taking up memory and other system resources. After disabling it, I noticed that 5-10% more of my RAM was available to me.

Defragged all the hard drives

I couldn’t remember the last time I properly defragged the hard drives, so I left it overnight last night to do it’s work. The fragmentation has decreased by about 45% so that should be worth something.

Installed MaxMem

I used to have an application installed on my old laptop many years ago that freed up RAM that was taken up by programs no longer using it. MaxMem does a similar job. Every time I run it, I get about 15-20% of my RAM back that was otherwise taken up.

So has this made a difference?

Actually, yes it has! The computer boots a bit faster and applications load up faster and run smoother. Also the Windows Experience Index for my Processor, Memory, and HDD access have all gone up by 0.1. I know, that’s not a lot but it seems to make a difference nonetheless. Also, taking into consideration that my RAM will go up yet another Gigabyte in a month (thanks to my folks), I think I’m starting to sway towards a new mobile phone now.

Still, it’s early days. I need to test out the system to see if it really is stable…

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