How to Make Your Computer Meaningfully Faster

There are many people who have many incorrect (largely outdated) ideas about how to make their computers faster. In my experience as someone who works at a business that repairs computers and makes them faster, there are a limited number of things that will effectively improve your computer's speed.

This resource is for your bog standard windows computer; I don't know much about gaming computers and I can't help you make yours faster. If you're wondering "But what about Apple?" there is a rather comprehensive answer for you at the link.

What does it even mean to have a fast computer?

There are three primary components that make a computer "fast" that are present in nearly every machine.

• Processor. Your Processor is how your computer handles processes. You don't really need to understand this, just understand that in the normal course of things, you cannot upgrade your processor. If your processor is the reason that your computer is slow, you have limited options to increase the speed.
• RAM. The RAM is Random Access Memory; it is the part that handles what your computer is actively "thinking about" at any given time.
• Drive. Your computer has some variety or other of storage drive in it. At the time of this writing (March 2024) we are on the cusp of moving totally away from one kind of drive to another, which will be more fully explained later.

So if you're working on a database on your computer your processor is what parses code and talks to the motherboard and tells your monitor how to display the spreadsheet to you. The RAM is holding all the changes that you've made and the information that you've loaded; it will store that information as long as the program is opened but will not keep it unless you tell it to save to your drive, which is long-term storage for information. If you've ever lost work because a program closed, the changes are an example of data that was being kept in RAM because it hadn't been saved to storage. This is confusing for some people because they think "memory" means "long term storage," which is incorrect when discussing computers.

A "fast" computer is a computer in which all of these components are working together well; a fast processor will open a program and make it operational quickly, sufficient RAM will allow your computer to "think about" lots of things at the same time without struggling to keep up, and an SSD will store and retrieve data very quickly. Sometimes you can have a "fast" computer with a slow processor, or a "fast" computer with an HDD, but generally speaking when you're looking to make a computer faster you're looking to improve the performance of one or more of these components.

Diagnosing the causes of slowness

The best way to figure out why your computer is slow is to get a look at what it's doing. On a Windows machine, this generally means exploring the Task Manager. Many people just use Task Manager to shut down frozen programs and never explore it more deeply, but the Task Manager is a valuable tool for figuring out what's going on under the hood, so to speak. The Task Manager can tell you about the performance of your:

• CPU (processor)
• Memory (RAM)
• Disk (SSD or HDD)
• Internet (Ethernet or WiFi)
• GPU (Graphics processor)

When you are experiencing slowness in your computer, hit Ctrl+Alt+Del twice and open the Task Manager, then select performance and see if anything is acting weird. The task manager has both visual and numeric representations of what resources your computer is using and you can click into each of them to see how they react to different behaviors on your computer. Close out of your browser, open your Task Manager, drill into the Memory tab, and then restore all the windows from your browser to see how your computer reacts to a sudden spike in memory use. Wait for your fan to turn on then open Task Manager and see what percentage your processor is at. Check the Disk (which doesn't tell you about how much is being stored, but how much time is being spent reading or writing to storage) and see if it's spending too much time active.

Your task manager is a great tool for telling you where to start when you're hoping to speed up your computer.