How to speed up Windows and Improve PC Performance

When I was buying my notebook all I had in mind was performance. I wanted to have one of Intel's Penryn CPU-s, 2 gigs of fast ram, discrete video card and Windows Vista operating system. I was sure with that specifications, especially with Core 2 Duo, my laptop would fly with speed. But when I got my new laptop I had a terrible experience. Notebook was slow like something was terribly wrong!

I knew Vista was not the fastest operating system but I tweaked it and removed all unnecessary applications and services. But performance was not much better.

 I was also aware that processor was fast and it could not be the bottleneck because task manager showed CPU consumption between 5-10%. Ram could not be to be blamed because there were more than enough, even for resource-hungry Vista Home Premium. Perhaps video card! Not really because Nvidia 8400 was more than capable enough of running this show. Than there were too options left. Operating system or hard drive. Vista was definitely to be blamed to some extent but not that much. If the operating system code was badly written-with many turning instead of less coding lines processor would probably take the burden and utilize more. But it did not. It was barely working. So the only thing that could be the cause of slow Vista experience was hard drive.

 Do not take me wrong processor is important, but by far the slowest computer part is hard drive. So I went for it and bought new faster 7200 rpm hard drive and after than I immediately noticed much faster performance and application launch time. And I remembered the fact I read somewhere which says that computer's speed can be only measured by it's slowest component. And the slowest part was hard drive. Processor was much much faster, memory around 20 times faster than HDD, video card had multi processor but HDD is still based on 30 year-old technology which when compared with modern processors does not really shine brightly.

I also find misleading hdd vendor information where they state announcement like hard drive can sequentially read or write at a rate of 100 MB/s. True but what about in real world. Divide that number by 10 or by 5 and now you get the real picture. Most of HDDs can boot for example XP operating system at a rate of 6-10 MB/s which is far from 100 MB/s is it!

 So the next time I will be in the market for a notebook I am sure I will have in mind fast drive and not quad core processor. Nowadays everyone such as Intel and benchmarking companies stresses the importance of CPU and are trying to convince us that new CPU with faster front side bus and second-data level cache is going to make miracles in speed and that we surely need it. Well that is all good but with slow hard drive it will not make much difference. CPU will be on a rest anyway if it does not get enough and fast all the data to work on. Just imagine Lamborghini on a traffic jammed highway. It can not go any faster than a heavy-loaded truck right!

So if you want to speedup computer and improve Windows performance and responsiveness, my advice is to invest your money in a faster hard drive or even better solid state drive instead into CPU. You will be surprised how much faster your computer can be.

Please also take in account that this is my general guidance in most situations, when you also meet basic hardware requirements for certain operating system. If you are an advanced user it makes sense to upgrade CPU and memory as well.

How to speed up Windows and Improve PC Performance