Ten no-cost PC upgrades
COVID has us all watching our pennies – but that doesn’t mean you can’t upgrade your PC. Darren Yates gives his top-ten upgrades that won’t cost you anything.
In my book, PC upgrades are all about gaining more performance, more speed. But in a COVID world where we’re all watching our spending, not every upgrade has to cost you money. These ten tips help keep my PC running at full-tilt without spending a cent.
01 Clean your PC
Unless you work in an ISO 14644 cleanroom, chances are good your PC will have attracted dust, even if it has a filter. Dust on your CPU and GPU coolers reduce their efficiency and drop the cooling of those components. For your CPU and GPU, reduced cooling inevitably leads to reduced performance as temperature limits are reached sooner. Always first remove the power from your PC and where possible, remove the CPU heatsink/fan and video card cooler before you begin (don’t lose the screws). Clean carefully with a damp (not wet) cloth, then dry and replace. Don’t remove the thermal paste on the heatsink underside unless you have replacement available.
02 Clean up your drives
If you’ve been using an SSD as your OS drive and using it for more than 12 months, chances are also good that it’s clogged up with orphaned and unnecessary files. Use a good file cleaner to remove unnecessary files. SSDs don’t last forever and wearlevelling requires the SSD to shuffle files around, even files you no longer need. Ultimately, the less junk files on your SSD, the less it has to move around and the longer it will last. Many older SSDs will also now be nearing their end-of-life, so if you haven’t, now is a good time to begin your regular backup regime – before the SSD kicks the tin.
03 Don’t use your SSD for media storage
For many of the same reasons, if you have a dual-drive SSD/HDD system, avoid storing media files on the SSD and keep them for the HDD. Media files – even Blu-ray rips – do not need super-fast storage. Your PC’s perceived speed is as much about the latency of its storage as it is the speed of its CPU, so keeping your SSD clean to run your OS as efficiently as possible will help ensure you get maximum performance from it.
04 Trial new apps using virtualisation
Windows often suffers from orphaned files that always seem to get left behind when you uninstall apps. I use a virtual machine (VM) to test new apps I’m not sure about – that way, my host (real) Windows machine can stay clean and I can just delete the VM when it gets stale. A virtual-machine is like having a new computer run as a software app on your PC – you can install a new OS, apps and it runs like a separate computer. It uses real storage, real CPU and real RAM but sits as files on your real PC you can remove quickly and easily. It’s also a great way to have a dual-OS system without having to muck around with BIOS-level dual-booting. VMWare Workstation Player and Oracle VirtualBox are free and get my tick-of-approval.
“Just because you have a PC with a zillion CPU and/or GPU cores doesn’t mean that they’re in use. If an app has been coded as single-threaded, then it will only use a single CPU core.”
05 Choose apps with multi-CPU/GPU core support
Just because you have a PC with a zillion CPU and/or GPU cores doesn’t mean that they’re in use. If
an app has been coded as single-threaded, then it will only use a single CPU core. The rest of the system may use other cores for background work, but your app won’t. Apps supporting multi-core processing may also include a manual thread or core count setting. Set this to the total core count of your CPU minus one (e.g. set to ‘5’ for a six-core CPU) to maximise performance and user interface responsiveness.
06 Recycle your old systems
If you have an old PC or laptop impersonating a door-stop, rejuvenate it and press it back into useful service. Many retail ‘home server’ boxes have similar processing hardware to most Android phones, so if you have an old laptop, you can easily turn it into a file/media server. Need a new OS? Any decent Linux distro should be fine (Xubuntu is my favourite) and don’t forget to backup first!
07 Update your video card drivers
Nvidia releases two sets of drivers – Game-Ready and Studio-Ready. Essentially, if you’re a gamer wanting zero-day game support, you go ‘gameready’, but if you’re a content creator, you go ‘studio-ready’. The thing is not all driver updates are smooth from day-zero, so read before you replace. Nevertheless, updates can be worthwhile – Nvidia has been known to release updates that tweak up performance of new cards, so don’t assume the driver software on the supplied CD/DVD is the last word.
08 Use a leaner OS
One of the great things about Linux is that you’re not stuck with one desktop environment. There are plenty to choose from. However, some are more hardware-demanding than others and if your PC is getting long in the tooth, a leaner OS desktop can help. I run a Linux distro on my Samsung Galaxy
A30 phone. Unfortunately, Xfce is too heavy for its ARM Cortex-A73 cores, so instead, LXDE gives me a leaner but faster experience. The same thing works on PCs as well – Xfce is leaner than KDE for example and LXDE is lighter and faster again. Just the thing to give older PCs a new lease on life.
09 The old ‘clean install’
Yep, this is an old chestnut – but it works. A clean install is a timesucking experience, but it’s like a spring-clean that removes dead files and forces you to think about which apps you really need. Of course, you need to have your OS install media, plus all your driver and app install media ready to go, or in the case of driver software, be able to access it, whether local storage or online. And did we mention backing up?
10 Donate it!
With renewed focus on recycling our growing mountain of e-waste, I reckon provided your PC or laptop (or even tablet) isn’t too old, it’s better to donate it and give it a second life. There are many charities and organisations that will take good-quality second-hand computers, refurbish them and offer them to those who are doing it tough. If you no longer have a use for it, you can be sure someone else will. Always check with your favourite charity or organisation beforehand and never just dump your old kit at their front-door.
If you can perform any of these tips, you’re not only saving money, but you’re keeping your old tech out of e-waste – and that’s got to be a good thing.