Computer Performance Upgrades?

Question

Whats the best way to update and speed up computer performance, i play Online games and I already run at a good internet speed, but i want to have one of the best connections around. So should i upgrade memory? Hard drive? what should i do? to make it better?

Also if i upgrade more memory and such can i leave the other memory card in there and use both to enhance the power even more?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Memory is by far the best price performance option. If your system is running on less than 1gb memory, adding more is the cheapest way to go. Keeping the existing memory depends on what you currently have and the number of sticks you can put in.

For example, if you only have two slots and have 1gb of ram, you may already be using both slots. To upgrade your memory, you'll need to free up at least one of those slots.

Memory speed also matters. If you have a fast ram in one slot and a slower one in another, the faster one will downgrade to the slower one. Of course, putting faster ram than your mother board will support also downgrades the memory to the motherboard speed.

If you do alot of disk access, getting a faster disk may also help. Defragmenting a heavily fragmented drive could help. Changing to a faster controller could help.

Answer 2

If you can handle the technical details, check out www.tomshardware.com for the performance of specific products. I point a lot of performance questions there. Be sure to read the Guides, not just the latest news and reviews.

Without the specs of your current PC, it's tough to recommend a specific performance enhanvement. A known budget would help too. For most gaming, the single greatest performance boost comes from the video card - not more memory. This is somewhat less true for browser-based on-line gaming (but very true for installed software played on-line).

Personally, I like RAID-0 disk configurations for on-line gaming or anything that reads or writes to disk. RAID-0 shares the I/O load across two disks, boosting disk performance more than an upgrade to a faster rotational speed (e.g., 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM). Your motherboard may support this already. If not, you can buy an add-in RAID controller card (but consider upgrading the MB for performance reasons anyway).

A memory upgrade is not needed unless you really don't have enough. The on-line games will run fine on PCs with 512MB of RAM. If you upgrade, be sure to get matching DDR2 modules - assuming your motherboard supports them. Also, go all the way to 2GB (2x1GB modules) because the new Windows Vista operating system will use it all. My point may be lost here: it's not necessarily the amount of memory that constrains your performance because the type and speed of memory is more important once you have enough quantity. There are decent explanatinos of this on the better memory web sites, such a www.1stchoicemem.com. Of course, the Tom's Hardware benchmarks are more conclusive.

A final recommendation: be sure to follow good performance-related habits for your PC. Principal and most obvious is defragmenting your hard drive, which is really quick if you do it every day. Once a week is often enough but is a walk-away event. Also consider turning down (or off) your various protections like antivirus and anti-spywaye/adware and personal firewall. If your Internet connection goes through a router in your home, that device is protecting you from Internet-based attacks and can enable you to turn off the Windows XP personal firewall. If you don't understand all of the threats and protections in place, leave the personal firewall and antivirus on. This may sound contrary to the last point, but make sure you either have run some good anti-spyware/adware package or manually cleaned up the add-ons (from the IEv6 browser, click Tools --> Manage Add-Ons). Otherwise, these nasties potentially can suck the performance out of your browser-based games.

Good luck!

Answer 3

As for the memory, depending on what you have in there will determine your upgrade path. If you only have 2 slots for memory and you have 2 256MB sticks in there then no you won't be able to unless you remove one.

The 'triad of power' for gaming are Video Card, CPU, and Memory. Once your data is loaded your hard drive doesn't matter quite as much. If you haven't purchased a video card in more than 2 years I would start there. If you don't know your current specs it's hard to recommend upgrades.

Answer 4

I had 128 MB of memory and added 1 GB. My boot up time dropped from 5 minutes down to 30 seconds. My computer surfed the web 2-3 times faster.

You leave the old memory card in. You put the biggest memory card in slot one and the smallest memory card in slot two. So you remove the old card because it is in slot one. You put the new bigger memory in slot one. Then, you put the old memory in slot two. That as opposed to simply putting the new memory card in the available open slot. It's pretty easy; it took me about ten minutes.

Micron is a memory card maker from America who sells factory direct to the public at a substantial savings (about 50%). At their website, they can scan your PC and show you what can go in your computer. I spent $100 and got 1 GB, and I am very glad that I did. It was well worth the money. Their website is called crucial.com.

http://www.crucial.com/

Answer 5

confident, maximum actual. to your particular laptop, the main RAM that it may help is 2gb, suitable now it maximum in all possibility has 256mb, that's very low by using in the present day's standards. It helps DDR 333 (laptop 2700) and DDR 4 hundred (laptop 3200). it heavily isn't waiting to apply DDR2 or DDR3. the main effective subject you need to do could be to purchase 2 1gb sticks of DDR 4 hundred RAM. that would desire to run you approximately $60-$80 USD. you will additionally opt to substantiate to purchase 2 comparable RAM modules, in case you do get greater advantageous than one. often they arrive in what's called 'twin channel kits', meaning it particularly is 2 of them in a kit, that are precisely alike. And greater importantly; (Technical) They run on 2 channels, probably doubling the communique speed. Oh, and as an ingredient notice, for overall performance, you will choose a decrease "CAS" score, the conventional is 3, yet you will locate 2.5 or 2.