Hello everyone! Given the current situation I’ve found that I’ve had a lot more time on my hands (like most people) and have been searching for a way to occupy myself, this presented itself last week. For my 18th birthday my parents got me the new computer that I wanted; I’d found it only after a considerable amount of searching on Ebay but its specs more than satisfied my requirements and I was very lucky with the bidding. Anyway, when it arrived I felt it necessary to put it through a battery of tests to ascertain its capabilities and to then go about maximising it’s potential. This was not strictly speaking necessary given that it already allowed me to play the games I wanted (The Witcher 3, Halo MCC and Doom) at 1080p max settings but I like to tinker, and it hurts to think that there’s performance just sitting there waiting for you to unleash it. In this post I’m going to go over basic settings and programs I use to improve my PC’s performance (all of which are applicable for any Windows PC) and in my next post I’ll talk about some more complex changes, some of which are specific to my computer like the process of overclocking and undervolting my GPU.
First things first, what can you do to increase performance during everyday use? Two things: disable unimportant startup apps and turn off background apps altogether. This will prevent your PC from loading unused programs when booting up or during normal use and should speed things up a bit.
Next, optimise your hard drives (be it SSD, HDD or Fusion). This will allow the computer to rearrange your files on the hard drive so that they’re in a more logical order and so that the ones you use most often are most easily reachable – this should improve loading times.
Thirdly, turn off unnecessary Windows graphics and animations. This will stop your computer from wasting it’s resources on unnecessary settings like taskbar/app animations or menu fading etc. You can find this by searching for “performance settings,” I tend to leave “smooth edges of screen fonts” on because it makes it easier to read text…
Finally, if you want to increase your PC’s gaming performance then I would recommend that you download Razer Cortex which is a free game booster. It boosts your system’s performance and gives you higher frame rates and faster load times by tuning your PC and forcing it to focus solely on the game that you’re playing. The performance increase isn’t massive but it’s certainly there and considering that this is a free program it’s well worth trying it out.
I hope you enjoyed this article and found it useful. Next post I’ll be getting quite a lot more technical so if that’s something that interests you be sure to sign up below!
Patrick Kyak 