Friday 26 October 2012

Technology: How To Speed Up Your PC

Cheap and Dead 1G DDR2 RAM
Image from Locky's English Playground
Yup, after replacing the power supply on my 4 year old PC turns out that it was in fact one RAM and its RAM slot that died. RAM is nothing, but RAM slot can't be fixed, so my PC is revived, but half dead, working at 8 times the time it used to take. On one hand I am trying to get hold of a cheapo 4Gb DDR2 RAM from online shopping, on the other, I must keep my PC usable while the RAM is to be delivered.

I have to find ways to do that.

I have always been using ReadyBoost on Windows 7, which is an easy way to speed up the PC a bit. ReadyBoost speeds up the computer by using external USB flash drives as extra cache. It doesn't replace RAM at all, but it does boost the speed a little.
Image from Locky's English Playground

To use ReadyBoost, plug in any USB flash drive and select "Speed Up My System using Windows ReadyBoost", if that doesn't appear, go to the drive and right click and select Properties, choose ReadyBoost tab and check "Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost", then click Apply.


Another method I have applied is compressing the hard disks. The screen capture below is actually taken after I have compressed the hard disks, otherwise, they will be full by now. Particularly for my Windows 7 drive, at one point it was only 300kb left, after the compression, it has at least 6.79Gb of space left, that is awesome compression rate!
Image from Locky's English Playground
To get your hard disk compressed, first, do this at night before bed and leave it on while you sleep, because this will take from 1 hour to 3 hours depending on your computer speed. One hard disk of mine took 3 hours, I did all of them in 4 separate nights.

Once the time is right, go and right-click on the disk, select Properties, then go to General tab, perform a Disk Cleanup to free some hard disk space, then check "Compress this drive to save disk space" and then click Apply. After 3 hours, your computer will be so much more spacious and quite a bit faster.

Of course, there are many more ways to speed up your computer, the best way is of course to add RAM (let's hope my cheapo 4G DDR2 667Mhz RAM from Taobao will arrive sooner to speed up my PC), but so far, my computer is about 70% of its usual speed at 2 x 1G DDR2 800Mhz RAM. Not too bad considering it is running on just 1G RAM and 3 x 1G USB flash drives.

I quite like online shopping now. This is the second time I shop from Taobao, the first time I bought LED lightbulbs, and they are still going strong!


Vocabulary:
turn out -- phrasal verb to be known or discovered finally and surprisingly
cheapo -- (adj) [before noun] informal low in price and often low in quality


Resources:

Living: Lamps & LED @ Taobao @ Locky's English Playground
http://lockyep.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-lamps-led-taobao.html

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/turn-out_1?q=turns+out#turn-out_1__2
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/cheapo?q=cheapo