Discussion on:

Increase any PCs performance with these 10 steps

Running programs from a RAMDrive means that you never have to access the hard drive. Any "portable app" can be ran in a RAMDrive. Try using a portable version of FireFox or Chrome and make sure that all temp files stay in the RAM. Zero seek time can do wonders.

I'm surprised not to see "upgrade RAM" to this list. The price to upgrade the RAM in your system is so low that oftentimes, it's the cheapest way to add performance to a machine experiencing slowness. And compared to switching to a faster drive, it's so much less complicated...

You addressed cable and satellite systems, and DSL systems, but you forgot about the No.1 fastest systems out there, and it's FIOS (Fiber Optical Coax System) as offered by Verizon locally in SoCalifornia, and other carriers back East, North, and South. It is a big investment by the companies that have/offer FIOS systems, as each network connection has a dedicated SINGULAR LINE HOOKUP to the FIOS Coax system, a dedicated FIOS Terminal, a high-end high-speed FIOS Router inside the home/business (wireless), and the FIOS lines literally have to be dug into the local streets and sidewalks, driveways, etc so that installations are complex vs simple cable, Satellite, or DSL.

When FIOS came to our neighborhood in Ventura County, CA, most everyone was hooked up with Time-Warner Cable, but no more! They are virtually gone from here now, and FIOS has been installed in virtually every single home/business where the line installs took place, bar none. Cost is about the same as cable/DSL so it's a no-brainer to go FIOS when you can pick up amazing download/upload speeds vs any other type of system, end of story! My system, for example, is a "35/35" FIOS system, and that's 35Mb/sec download AND upload also, so if you happen to construct web pages and do commercial applications which often have to upload huge quantities of data, pictures, graphics, etc to achieve your mission, the upload speeds are increased an average of 30X-35X vs the cable system that we used to have.

That is the upload speed of my "fast" cable modem system was less than 1Mb/sec, and look at me now! I can upload without concern for data acquisition and payments for excessive data inference and use at 30-35Mb/sec vs less than the 1Mb/sec speeds of the former cable system and that type of performance is very typical with FIOS. Not to mention the download speeds, I mean when have you heard of residential accounts pushing more than 35Mb/sec 24/7, with no variance whatsoever because a dedicated FIOS line is just that, and it doesn't get "throttled or cut back" when loads are at their peaks daily, nightly...it just keeps on working at its highest speed forever, literally...amazing!

My systems "speeded up" considerably with the FIOS system installed, because there is zero waiting time for pages to load vs cable/DSL or satellite systems in terms of browser performance...plus I've been a Chrome browser user for almost 3 years and counting and having FIOS plus Chrome in the house is a Godsend, to say the least!

Our computers interact more and more with the internet, even for basic functions when we need to source a major Search Engine for whatever reason, when our systems are interacting with our mobile devices, etc...there's hundreds of reasons and causes as to why we need fast internet speeds vs the "old way" of cable/DSL, and satellite systems. You WILL NOTICE a HUGE IMPROVEMENT in your system's performance with FIOS installed because it eliminates all bottlenecks and connections with secondary servers and equipment, ie in your neighbor's homes and businesses for example, so that there is no competing for bandwidth with FIOS installed: your system is a dedicated ISP address with vastly superior firepower to virtually any other type of internet hookup today, and the difference between FIOS and the other systems is totally off-scale once you begin to compare and analyze how your system performs with FIOS vs the other types of connections, bar none.

I am very surprised that you forgot to address internet connectivity and its role in system "slowness and poor response time" for interaction with your computers and mobile devices of all types, and FIOS is in a Class of One with respect to download and upload speeds, and universally disfavored "throttling", or "peak period competition" with your neighbor's systems and connections in the region you live in, and certainly FIOS is the only type of system that can administer upload and download speeds 24/7 that stay the same, have no "peak periods" competition within itself for each connection to the FIOS system. In short system speed-up will be accomplished immediately and instantaneously when your FIOS system gets online, and you will experience a level of performance never dreamed of with all things internet.

I don't work for Verizon or any other FIOS company, and I am only reporting the tip of the iceberg with respect to benefits achieved with a FIOS connection vs the traditional cable/DSL/satellite hookups that have been standardized, slowly strangling their own systems with peak time service interruptions and throttling of their internet connection speeds without fail presently, and there is no solving problems with those types of connections except to choose FIOS when it comes to your neighborhood and giving all those negatives a big push into the ocean, never to be thought of again.

With FIOS installed in a residence or business system speed-ups are a natural occurrence and part of the deal when you sign up, and it happens every time without fail to everyone who experiences FIOS firsthand. Go FIOS!

The top FIOS speed is not even half the speed of a home LAN running at 100Mbps, let alone with a Gigabit router. And even the old Wireless-G standard (54Mbps) equals or beats most FIOS speeds. So from a networking standpoint, FIOS may be faster than any other ISP out there, but only handles part of the problem.

Of course, that's assuming that your house has power. FIOS depends on the power in the house for everything to work; converting light signals coming over fiber-optic cable back to electrical signals for CAT5/6 or coax cable requires electricity, after all. Not to mention customers tend to hate being told they have to go out, remove the battery box cover, & unplug/reconnect the battery backup as part of their tech support call.

And let's not even start in on the "troubleshooting tool" that Verizon pushes on its customers. If the tech support agent doesn't download it on your PC for you, they'll pester you to provide an email address so they can send the download link...every time you call in.

rather than google's DNS... for the paranoid among us.

no text

I've switched to Dragon(better EULA), and use Bing now. Just my little protest for Google's arrogance about privacy.

My home ISP won't allow an outside DNS; I tried configuring my router to use OpenDNS and completely lost www connectivity unless I entered the IP. Adding insult to injury, most of the wireless networks I connect to outside the home use NAT, which also knackers external DNS lookup unless the router is specifically configured to allow it..

I was darting around a couple hundred miles west of here looking for a location where the weather would allow me to see the transit of Venus last month. I'd pull in to some place with a hot spot to fire up the laptop and check weather, but ended up sampling quite a lot of the local coffee offerings before I finally found a hot spot I could connect to.

I hadn't thought about it, but I bet it was my OpenDNS settings.

BTW the hot spot I could use was at a McDonald's in Erie Pennsylvania.

When I missed the transit! I completely forgot about it that day!

I'm pretty sure it was 1966 when my dad bought me an astronomy book. I remember reading of the transit, and never imagined I'd live all the way to 2004, let alone 2012. It seemed so far off in the future, and (being 7 at the time) I calculated I'd be in my 50's... IMPOSSIBLE! Not ME!!

I saw both transits. My son drove me to the observatory at his college, we were barely above the fog and were lucky to see it.

This time, I vowed I'd drive as far as necessary to see it. Up to the day of the transit it looked like I'd be driving south into West Virginia. It turned out Lake Erie (and Ontario) caused the clouds to dissipate that day, apparently perfect conditions for this. There was a Lake Erie-shaped hole in the clouds, I was able to see the whole thing up to sunset.

I made a lousy video of it, except the few moments around the sun slipping below the horizon are interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSuXKFSDAIg

The best video I saw of the event had a "green flash" at the very end, where the last remnant of sun turns bright green before disappearing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6PrCV4mLE0&feature=related

Sorry to hear you missed it. If you're anywhere in the north eastern US you probably wouldn't have been able to see it anyway, it was solid clouds. I ended up driving a couple hundred miles to Presque Isle park in Erie Pennsylvania. Nobody here in the southern tier saw it. Too cloudy.

That was really cool pgit!! I feel better now, as at least I got to see someone's effort to capture this rare event! Wished I was there, but I can really appreciate your efforts, and thanks for the post!!

OpenDNS, GoogleDNS and others are all good, but why not choose the best DNS servers for your situation. Steve Gibson over at grc.com has great tool just for this purpose. His DNSBenchmark tool will scour though quite a few servers and let you know which ones are faster and more secure. You can find it here at this site: https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

Thanks for bringing that up. It's been a while since I've dropped by Mr. Gibson's place, but it's always a worthwhile venture.

Thanks for the tip - I've never drilled down on Steve's site - far enough to find all his goodies - I'm running the benchmark now!

Thought I would look at the possibility of changing my DNS server and visited the grc site. But I'm obviously not as technically minded as I could be because the info given all sounds too confusing for me

If your pc has less than 2 gigs of ram, Adding more memory will do more to speed it up than any of these other things.

A free download (donations accepted) "Startup Inspector" will show you all the applications that are opened upon starting. These applications suck up lots of RAM and bog things down.
Then you can decide if the app is really needed each time the PC is turned on. Some of the culprits are Adobe Reader. Wait until you actually need it to open a PDF before it opens.

There are lots of apps that have a check box when being installed that lets it be put on your start menu. Often that little box is ignored or missed and there goes another "feature" that is effectively taking some RAM out of availability. You can always buy more RAM but first see why it is really needed.

If you are running graphic or CPU intensive software adding a video card can help tremendously. They are not just for gamers. If you do very much photo editing, drafting, mapping, or even database work, adding a graphics card can free up RAM and CPU processes and make a huge difference in performance. And you don't need to move to a $200 video card to see a benefit, even a $60 GeForce card can make a big difference.

Here is something I used to do on a daily basis on an old Win XP that was choking with junk. I still do it occasionally for a slow running program on my Win 7 system:
Open the Task Manager Processes tab & raise the Priority of the Image Name for the program that is running slow. The higher you set the program's Priority, the more system resources will be allocated to it, so it should speed up.
Be careful with Realtime, it could stall Windows causing you to reboot.

speed my PC articles he links to; the newbies could use the tips! Thanks!

If it's under your head, just ignore it & move on.

Great article with nice amount of depth. Another super easy hardware updgrade (that arguably has the most benefit) is upgrading the RAM! As far as software tweaks there are a lot so I'll just mention a couple here. If you want more detail on these or even more PC speed tips you can find it at http://www.fixingaslowcomputer.com 1) Check the power settings because the wrong setting can make your CPU and GPU run at slower speeds to save power. 2) Scan your computer for Ad-ware which in many cases can be worse than viruses!