Well, I know its the Holiday Season, so many of us will have retail therapy in mind...
A new PC may be on the list, but consider that your existing PC can be radically speeded up by some of the processes I detailed in another thread elsewhere on this forum... essentially:
However, without doubt, the slowest thing in your PC, the thing that causes more waiting around that anything else, is likely to be your disk...
If you have SATA disks, you may have been tempted by a Solid State Drive (SSD) - a device that is essentially a large chunk of memory that looks like a traditional mechanical disk to your PC, but is many times faster. The problem is that SSDs are generally smaller than most ordinary disks (they max out at about 512Gb, but are typically 256Gb, rather than the 1Tb or larger of ordinary drives). What's more, you have all that data on your hard drive, and its a major pain in the **** to shift it all.
What if you could make your existing drive go a WHOLE BUNCH FASTER without changing the disk or re-installing any software?
Crucial, who are the retail arm of Micron (one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world) have come up with a neat idea which is essentially a large intelligent cache that for about 60 quid (incl. VAT) makes an existing hard drive behave almost as fast as an SSD - NOTE: Windows 7 only....
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspec...0M4SSC2BDA
Extremely well reviewed... If you are doing CAD or just want a much faster system, it's a cheap solution...
EDIT: I don't work for Crucial/Micron - just think that this is a neat product and will be using it myself
A new PC may be on the list, but consider that your existing PC can be radically speeded up by some of the processes I detailed in another thread elsewhere on this forum... essentially:
- Error check the disk (you will have to re-boot to do this) - check the box asking if you want to fix any errors and check free space. Reboot.
- Download Piriform Defraggler - Go to "Action" then "Advanced" then "Check Drive for Errors" - do not defragment the drive at this point.
- When that's over and Windows is running again, download and run Piriform CCleaner to remove all the crap temp files cluttering up you system, then de-fragment the disk using Defraggler (Action->Defrag) - do the CCleaner first as it makes the de-fragment much faster. Make sure all apps are closed when running CCleaner - if a browser is open, it won't be able to clean out the caches.
- Do a complete scan with your virus scanner - again, takes a while but very necessary - make sure its base version and data files are up-to-date before the scan. Some virus scanners can severely impact system performance - which one are you using? (I usually recommend AVG Free)Make sure it automatically updates every day - not every week or manually.
- Go to Microsoft Update and keep running it until it says that there are no more updates for your computer - note that you need to check the optional updates because there will probably be updates to the drivers you installed previously that will be deemed to be out of date and replacements will be marked as optional updates by Windows Update. Make sure "Automatic Updates" are enabled..
- Download and run Piriform Speccy - this is a great tool to look at the whole of your system to report on its hardware and file versions... just checks that you really have the BIOS versions etc. you think you have...
However, without doubt, the slowest thing in your PC, the thing that causes more waiting around that anything else, is likely to be your disk...
If you have SATA disks, you may have been tempted by a Solid State Drive (SSD) - a device that is essentially a large chunk of memory that looks like a traditional mechanical disk to your PC, but is many times faster. The problem is that SSDs are generally smaller than most ordinary disks (they max out at about 512Gb, but are typically 256Gb, rather than the 1Tb or larger of ordinary drives). What's more, you have all that data on your hard drive, and its a major pain in the **** to shift it all.
What if you could make your existing drive go a WHOLE BUNCH FASTER without changing the disk or re-installing any software?
Crucial, who are the retail arm of Micron (one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world) have come up with a neat idea which is essentially a large intelligent cache that for about 60 quid (incl. VAT) makes an existing hard drive behave almost as fast as an SSD - NOTE: Windows 7 only....
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspec...0M4SSC2BDA
Extremely well reviewed... If you are doing CAD or just want a much faster system, it's a cheap solution...
EDIT: I don't work for Crucial/Micron - just think that this is a neat product and will be using it myself
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