How to speed up your computer the right way - get an SSD

[harlan4096]

In my last article here on the site, I suggested that running system cleaners, tune-up tools, and other third-party tools for the purpose of speeding up your PC significantly is not advised. While there are certainly some tools that may address certain issues that you may experience, e.g. by running a tool like Throttlestop to prevent CPU throttling, or by removing unneeded programs from autostart or making sure that there is enough free disk space on the drive for the pagefile and caches.

If you want to go beyond that, you probably wonder how to speed up your computer?

There are a few different ways to do so. Let's get a few of the complex options out of the way, before I reveal the ideal option.

Overclocking

This isn't recommended for normal users as it is quite technical and because there is a chance that it may damage the computer's hardware or cause other issues such as crashes that may lead to even more issues, e.g. data loss.

It takes time to understand how the processor or video card work, and to find out whether overclocking is even worthwhile. Generally speaking: if you have an AMD Ryzen processor you can overclock it, but if you have an Intel processor it's slightly complicated.

Basically, you will require a K-CPU to overclock, i.e. an i5-7500 cannot be overclocked, but an i5-7500K can be. Find out what you have, do some research about the pros and cons to understand the process and if it's actually worth it. You can overclock Graphics cards more easily. The performance increase that you may get from overclocking may not be huge and you may reduce the lifetime of the component and increase power consumption and heat generation at the same time.

Linux

Many people rely on Windows programs for their school/business work and Linux may not be an ideal solution for those. It requires that you install a different operating system on the device and get to learn it. Linux has come a long way from the "installation requires a computer science degree" to how things are today; distributions like Linux Mint, Manjaro, or even Ubuntu offer experiences that are very similar to what you get on Windows.

If you are a home user willing to shift to Linux, you may find that it is lighter on resources and that may lead to better performance when you use the computer. Obviously, you may not be able to run all programs or games on Linux that you ran on Windows, but there is Wine, and Steam maker Valve's continued effort to push Linux.

My advice: try a live USB to see if Linux is your cup of tea before installing it on your main drive. Note that performance is better if you run it from a hard drive and not a USB drive.

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