Your PC is a pretty no nonsense piece of kit that combines technology that skirts the very edges of our technical know-how (such as the chip), and (the banal such as the monitor, keyboard and cooling fan). When you buy your new system, whether a laptop or a desktop, it will probably be close to being at the cutting edge of what you can buy. At time of writing, for a laptop this means 4GB of memory and around 500GB of hard disk, and for a desktop means 8GB of memory and around 4TB of hard disk!

The numbers start to sound a little silly after a while. I learnt the SI series of prefixes, (i.e. the mega, giga and tera etc which precede big numbers) back in physics class, but I never expected to use them. To think that we have now gone from PCs with 40 megabytes of hard disk space to ones with 4 terabytes (an increase of a factor of 100,000) in a little over 15 years is quite stunning. Similarly to go from PCs with under a single megabyte of RAM, up to ones with 8 gigabytes (an increase of a factor of 10,000) in the same time is astounding.

But the other side of the coin is that if money were no object and you went out to buy the best PC that you could get your hands on, you already know that 12 months down the line your system is only going to have half the memory and half the storage of the best computers on the market.

This makes it clear that if you are going to keep your computing technology up to date, by constantly buying more powerful machines, you will end up spending a fortune just to stand still. So the bottom line is that your best bet is to roll your sleeves up and try to squeeze out every last drop of performance from the PC you already have.

A good place to start when you are trying to improve your system’s power is to boost the RAM. What RAM will do is allow you to run more applications at the same time, or more memory intensive individual applications, such as video games and media editing programs. However what doubling (say) your RAM won’t do is automatically make your system twice as fast.

To understand this you can think of RAM as a backpack. If you have a small pack, but only a few small things to put in it, a small pack is as effective as a big one and there is no performance advantage as long as everything fits in fine. However, if you now want to fit in your tent, and a thick sleeping bag, your small pack will simply be too small and that is when you need something bigger.

So it is with computers. When you run an application your PC loads it from storage to memory (ie from the hard disk to RAM). For basic applications like word processors, email packages and web browsers, you won’t need much memory and your PC will probably even be able to run all the applications at the same time. However, if you then want to start working on your new video editing package, or playing the very latest graphics-intensive video game, you might find that the RAM requirements are too great to fit in the memory available on your PC.

A particular problem you might face, if you decide to upgrade your operating system to Vista, is that Vista needs more RAM than Windows XP. So you might find that, all other things being the same (ie you are running the same software) your PC runs more slowly under Vista than it did before. To release the full power of Vista you really need more RAM. Also, when using certain RAM intensive applications (for example games or video/image editing applications), the PC can be made considerably faster by installing a graphics card with its own RAM. So if you already have a graphics card installed you can try adding more RAM to this card as well.

Upgrading RAM isn’t particularly difficult and certainly isn’t beyond the abilities of an interested amateur. Basically you need to open your PC or laptop, identify how much space you have for more memory, buy the right memory and then install it.

There are a number of online tutorials that will explain what you need to do so I won’t go into detail here. Just remember the following points: 1) opening your PC or laptop may cancel the warranty, so check before you start; 2) you can’t just stick any old memory chip into your system, but must check that it matches your computer (websites like www.crucial.com and www.kingston.com will help you with this); and 3) make sure your PC and laptop are turned off and don’t go jabbing around with a screwdriver because you might break something or, worse, electrocute yourself. You also need to be careful about harming the components with static electricity so when touching computer parts it is a good idea to have a specialist wrist strap that earths body static.

A non starter, when it comes to system upgrades, is replacing the processor itself. Not much to talk about here. The processor is so integral to your system that everything, including software and hardware, will be configured to match your processor. Changing the processor will mean a lot of extra work for no great performance gain. If you are happy changing the CPU then fine, but you should only attempt it if you are an expert!

An alternative to changing your CPU is to “overclock” it. In fact one leading PC manufacturer, whose site I checked today, was selling a high end laptop whose 1066MHz RAM, it is promised, is “overclockable to 1333MHz.” Overclockers (as exponents of overclocking are called) take advantage of a number of tricks, many of which amount to simply exploiting the hardware up to its design limits, as opposed to merely its operating limits.

This isn’t without cost though. Think of a car: if you had the opportunity to do it safely, you might be able to take an ordinary family auto and race it at over 100mph around a track for hours on end, however it won’t necessarily be stable and it will probably breakdown more quickly than if run at its normal operating speed. Then again sometimes you can win the lottery, since chip manufacturers will mass produce a higher spec chip and then sell it as a lower specification CPU. If you find one of these chips in your machine, a little expert tinkering might be all you need to do to have that chip operating a its true operating potential. Again, in car terms it is the equivalent of a car firm mass producing a 5 liter V10 engine but selling and running it as a 4 liter V8 by disabling a couple of cylinders.

Including hard disk size under performance enhancement tips is a little moot, since it will have little impact on performance per se (except that it is possible to buy hard drives with faster read/write capabilities). However, since running out of hard disk space will probably be one of the primary reasons you dispose of your old computer, and get a new one, hard disk management is an essential aspect of extending your PC’s life. Generally speaking you have three options: 1) clean out you hard drive to create more space; 2) replace your old hard drive with a bigger one; and 3) manage your data storage by moving out some data to an external device.

We will cover how to clean out your hard drive to create space, in a later section. Explaining how to replace your hard disk is beyond this article, however suffice it to say that this will require you to reinstall all your software onto the new drive and then move all the data across to the new disk. At some level this is going to require you to copy data from your old hard drive to your new one, which without some form of external device, is going to be demanding.

You are better off anticipating this problem and to start looking at creating specialized off-line storage system (a few TB should do the trick). Although this might be a little costly you will now have some serious space to play with and can start regularly backing up all your home PCs. You can then move all your big media files and sensitive documents across to the storage device leaving your PC and laptop with just essential documents and media.

Something often overlooked is the power supply. Although only a minor point you need to remember that if you do upgrade the hardware by, say, adding an extra hard drive, or a blu-ray player, you’ll also be increasing the drain on the PC’s power. The consequence of this could be that, unless you upgrade your power supply, you could cause system instability and possibly PC crashes.

Having done all the major things we can do to the hardware to improve performance let’s now look at the software you can use to boost your system. The PC performance enhancement software available on the market generally covers the following areas: registry optimization, hard disk cleaning and defragmentation, application memory tuning, and driver update management.

Registry optimization applications focus on the fact that with use the PC’s registry is updated and modified by the operating system. This can result in the registry becoming fragmented, accumulating erroneous, incorrect and obsolete entries, slowing your PC and making it crash more often. Registry boosting software will also defragment the registry and remove the dodgy registry entries, such as those placed there by poorly written software that has since been uninstalled without removing references to itself from the registry.

Hard disk cleaning and defragmentation applications reduce hard disk clutter by finding and deleting unnecessary files, while uninstall features totally remove unwanted software more effectively. Another matter they address is hard disk defragmentation. When saving data to the hard drive your computer will fit that data into available space. If the information is too large it will instead break up the file, slotting it into available slots dotted around the hard disk. This makes that file slightly slower to retrieve, when needed by the computer, and so defragmentation software can speed up your PC by bringing this distributed data back together in contiguous spaces.

Application memory tuning software scans allows you to scan the processes your PC is running and to modify the priority that your PC gives each one. At any point in time your computer will be running a large number of different processes. Unless told otherwise your PC will give all of these equal access to RAM. However it may be that you are happy for a certain task to run quietly in the background while you focus on more important, and RAM intensive, stuff. With memory tuners you can list the processes running and then manually reduce the priority of certain memory intensive programs, so that, for example, you reduce the priority of, say, a backup process so it runs in the background while you word process something.

Finally we come to driver update managers. For most of us, device drivers come preinstalled with our operating systems, or we install them from the CD that comes with any hardware we buy. However drivers are like any other software, sometimes being buggy or in conflict with other software. This is why regular updates are made available for all software, including drivers. If you don’t regularly update your drivers you may be experiencing a variety of unnecessary PC problems, which have been resolved, or you may not be enjoying the full functionality of the equipment you have installed. There are too many drivers to check manually, which is where driver update management software comes in, by automatically searching for updates to your drivers and then installing them.

The lesson is that with care and attention we can make sure our PCs stay as good as new, while with a little bit more ingenuity we can actually enhance our systems to keep them at the cutting edge of performance.