THREE WAYS TO WIN BY DOING NOTHING

OUR 30 TIPS WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO YOUR PC, BUT THERE ARE SOME COMMONLY REQUESTED TWEAKS THAT ARE A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME

HIGHER WATTAGE PSU = FASTER PC

It’s an understandable confusion as an 800W power supply unit (PSU) is definitely capable of delivering more power than a 400W unit, but that’s not how they work. A PC requires a certain amount of voltage to run and, provided your PSU can deliver enough of it (measured in Watts), then all is well. Fitting a 1,200W PSU to a machine requiring only 300W won’t make it go any faster. The machine draws power from the PSU rather than the PSU pushing the power into the PC.

DEFRAGGING AN SSD

When Windows 98 ruled the world, defragging the drive became a common maintenance routine. The process reunites file fragments into a contiguous block, which is beneficial for spinning drives that lose time by scrambling backwards and forwards over a platter, but completely pointless for SSDs, which can access everything at all times. To make matters worse, SSDs have wear-rates (TBW) and the defragging process chews into

it. Don’t defrag an SSD.

CLICK HERE TO OPTIMISE

Or rather, think before you do. Software optimisers promise much and on certain high-performance, well-maintained machines, a case could be made that running them may, just may, iron out a kink in the PC. When they’re installed on low-powered machines that barely have enough resources to run Chrome without stuttering, the whole PC grinds to a halt. Most optimisers I encounter are trials, which hog resources in order to declare, “We’ve found a temporary file, give us $20 to delete it”. If you aspire to running a tidy ship, then Storage Sense within Windows is worth investigating.