Top Performance Tips
Tips you can use to improve your computer's performance
Tips for your Hard Drive
UDMA Mode: By switching on the Ultra DMA mode can boost the performace of your hard drive and optical drives. This only works with systems that have 80-wire IDE cables. Older system still using 40-wire cables will not benifit. To turn on UDMA go to the control panel and double-click on the system icon. Select the Hardware tab and click Device Manager. Nest click the + nest to IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers to view allof the channels. Right click on one of these and select Properties, in the Current Transfer Mode box select DMA if available. Note in some cases UDMA mode will need to be enabled on the device itself, in this case there will often be a utility supplied by the drive manufacturer on the CD or which you can download from their website.
Defragmenting: On a regular basis defragment your drives this should improve load times for programs since th PC won't have to hunt around the disk for all the components it needs. It's especially useful to defrag your drive befor installing a large program ex: (Office, Viso, PhotoShop, ect) O'yes even GAMES can fragment all over the drive. If you defrag the drive first; all parts of the software will be installed together and should improve load time. It s also worth considering third-party tools as they are often more efficent than the built-in tools with Windows. A simple web search will give you an idea of what is avaliable.
Hard Drive Choice: When selecting a hard drive for your system, the important things to look for are spin speed ( in RPMs) and the seek time ( in milliseconds). The higher the speed and the lower the seek time equates to better system perfromance. As an example IDE hard drives have transfer rates of 100 MB/s or 133 MB/s and seek times of 7200 RPM. Other considerations to consider are capacity which can range from 40 GBs to well over 750 Gbs of storage. Buffer size can range from 2MB to 16MB and the most important considerations is the warranty which can be, depending on the manufacturer 3 Years or 5 Years. Seagate, one manufacturer, has a 40 GB 100 MB/s 7200 RPM 2 MB buffer with a 5 year warranty priced under $50.00 at the low end to a 750 GB 100 MB/s 7200 RPM 16 MB buffer with a 5 year warranty price at a little over $400.00 other manufacturer Western Digital, Maxtor, and Hitachi offer similar drives. The newer hard drives are Serial ATA and offer transfer times if 150 MB/s and 300 MB/s 7200 and 10000 RPMs with 8 MB and 16 Mb buffers with warranty of 3 years and 5 years. Before you consider a Serial ATA drive make sure your motherboard will support this type of drive and at what speed.
Cluster Size: When formatting a new hard drive set a cluster size appropriate to the type of data you'll be storing. A cluster is one or more sectors that constitute the smallest unit of space on a disk for storing data. Windows XP using NTFS file system defaults to 4,096 bytes per cluster but you can change that to anywhere between 512 and 64KB. The draw back to a large cluster size is small files will waste more space. Example would be if you store a file of only one letter it will use a cluster no matter the size. However, if you use a second hard drive to store large files videos as an example it's worth having larger clusters.
Smart: You can keep an eye on the health of your drive by using SMART (System Monitoring Analysis and Reprting) technology. SMART records a variety of data about the health of the drive in your computer and can offer early warnings of impending failure. SMART must be turned on in the system BIOS.
Backup: One of the most important maintenace tips is backup your hard drive. Backing up data should be done on a regular basis. A fast way of backing up is to create a disk image on the hard drive and burn it to CD later. One tool you can use is Back4win which is a free straigtforward, uncomplicated backup program that can be used to create copies of you most important files. You can download the Back4win program at www.back4win.com remember it's free so give it a try.