System Performance Tuning

 

Did you ever feel at times your computer is running real slow and you have to wait for a while before the system gets back to you? Can you imagine how shocking it will be if one day, you turn on your computer and you find that all the data is lost? In this issue and the next, we will address the issues on how to fine-tune your computer and how to ensure data integrity. The tips on optimizing your computer's performance will be discussed first in this article.

Factors Affecting System Performance

The performance of your PC depends on a number of factors:

• Type and speed of the CPU
• Type, speed and size of cache memory and system memory
• Type of I/O bus architecture - ISA, EISA, MCA, VL, or PCI
• Type and speed of hard disk, VGA card and network interface card
• Operating System
• Network loading - Server performance, network traffic, etc.

How to Enhance Your System Performance

In the article "Why's My Computer Slow?" (September '95 Issue No. 4), we have already talked about various network factors that can lead to the PC performance degradation. Here, we will focus on how an end-user can fine-tune some software and hardware settings to improve system performance at no extra cost.

1) Fine Tuning Your BIOS Settings (for experienced users only)

The very first thing that you can try to speed up your PC is to 'tweak' the BIOS settings. Beware that the BIOS settings affect the most basic system level elements of your computer. Do not make changes unless you are very sure what the result will be. If something goes wrong, reboot your PC and go back into the BIOS to revert your modifications.

Your user manual should provide you with instructions on how to access the BIOS setup screen. Usually there are at least three main setup screens, as described below :

• Standard settings screen for setting date, time, drive types, physical memory installed, etc. Make sure all of these settings reflect actual components in your computer.
• System settings screen for adjusting things like CPU speed, external and internal caching status, floating point unit (FPU) setting, memory shadowing, etc. Make sure that the CPU speed is set to "fast", all caches and the FPU are enabled if present. However, be aware that though enabling memory shadowing can improve performance, it may conflict with memory managers or other system settings.
• Chipset settings screen for adjusting the wait state setting for the chipset on your motherboard. The lower the number of wait states, the higher the system performance. If your system won't run or it crashes in Windows after lowering the number, reset the number back to the original setting.

2) Boost Windows and DOS performance

There are many ways to increase Windows and DOS performance. Here, we will mention some simple methods.

• If your PC has a Windows accelerator card installed, you can boost Windows performance by installing the drivers that came with your graphics card. You can check by clicking the Windows setup icon in the Program Manager and checking the display settings. If it is just VGA, you are using Windows default drivers and you are not taking the advantage of the speed and features of your graphics accelerator. To obtain the best performance, you can set the display resolution and number of colors as low as possible. However, your graphics card may be optimized for 256 colors and higher resolutions. Read your user's manual and/or experiment with this.
• Over time, as programs read from and write to a hard disk, information stored on the disk can become fragmented. If that happens, the disk will take longer to find and reassemble each time your system needs to run your program. To improve the performance, run DEFRAG weekly to defragment your hard disk.
• Smartdrv.exe is a disk cache program which can make a significant performance improvement by reserving some amount of DRAM memory in which it stores information read from the hard disk. Add Smartdrv in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file so that it starts automatically when the PC is booted up. Keep your cache size one quarter of the size of your overall amount of DRAM for best performance.
• Close all idle background applications to free up more memory to the system.

Coming Soon

In part II of this story, we will look at the issues of virus checking and ensuring data integrity. We will also examine the procedures for recovering your corrupted data as far as possible. So, stay tuned.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk