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Issue
26 - December 2000
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Let's Tune
Up Your PC
By
Tsui Siu Ki
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Ever thought about tuning
up your desktop PC? There are a few optimisation tricks that can
make your PC run faster. In this article, we will focus on how
an experienced user can fine-tune some system and hardware settings
of the PC to improve system performance at no extra cost. Unless
you are familiar with handling PCs, one has to be extra careful
when changing the system settings.
1) Fine Tuning Your BIOS Settings
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:
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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.
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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.
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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 performance
There are many ways to increase Windows
performance. Here, we shall mention some simple methods.
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Every PC has a Windows
accelerator card installed. You can unleash the power of the
graphics card and boost Windows performance by installing the
latest drivers. Try to get these drivers from the manufacturer
through the Web and install it. If you are not sure about the
manufacturer and model of the display card you are using, you
can check with the display card’s user manual. Or you may
find this information from the Device Manager by clicking the
System icon in the Control Panel.
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To obtain the best
performance of the graphics cards, you can set the display resolution
and colour depth as low as possible. In general, setting the
colour depth to 16-bit high colour or 24-bit true colour should
satisfy most applications and yield better performance than
using 32-bit colour or above. Read your user’s manual and/or
experiment with different colour depths.
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To improve disk
drive performance, Windows will use some system memory to cache
the data being read and written to the hard disks. However,
Windows uses too much memory for cache and leave too little
for applications. To improve system performance, we can limit
the maximum amount of physical memory used by adding the following
lines to the System.ini file:
[vcache]
MinFileCache=8192
MaxFileCache=16384
The maximum cache size recommended
is ¼ of your system memory. For example, if you have 64MB
RAM then you can limit the maximum cache size to 16MB.
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Windows uses a directory
(usually C:\WINDOWS\TEMP) to store temporary files that are
created by your system when new software is installed, or application
that performs auto-save function. These files will be deleted
automatically if they are not required any more. However, if
applications stop abnormally, these files may not be deleted
as expected. As a result, unnecessary files in the temporary
directory continue to increase and take up disk space. In order
to make the system run faster, it is always good practice to
clean up the “Temp” directory regularly to free up
some hard disk space.
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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 time to find and reassemble each time the system needs
to run a program. To improve the performance, run DEFRAG weekly
to defragment the hard disk.
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Close all idle background
applications to free up more memory to the system.
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Uninstall all unused
applications to free up more hard disk space.
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Use REGCLEAN program
from Microsoft to clean up the Windows registry regularly. This
will make Windows run faster.
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