Upgrading your processor will always speed up your computer, but sometimes this will not be the best thing to do. The first thing you need to do is find out where the bottle neck is in your system. The first step you would take to finding this out is by using the computers task manager. You can tell in here how much the computers resources are being used. If you want a more advanced diagnostics program then click on start, then run and type in perfmon. A program will now open and you will be able to monitor all of your computer components.

The following paragraphs will describe what you need to check, how to check it, and whether you should upgrade.

Processor: By looking in task manager you can tell if you need to upgrade. The processor will always run at 100% this is ok, but if it runs at 100% for long periods of time you will need a faster processor. Replacing the processor can be very expensive as you might also need to replace the motherboard. But you might not need to upgrade your processor as the problem could be the memory, check below.

Memory: Making sure the system has enough memory is very important. If the system runs out of memory it will start to use hard-disk space as memory. As a hard-disk runs at a much slower speed than memory does this will severely slow down your PC. Your processor will also be running very hard as it need to read and write data to the hard-drive.

Hard-Disk: Hard-Disk is very hard to diagnose. If you have an old hard-disk then it will be worth upgrading. This is because new hard-drives run at faster speeds, So replacing the hard-drive will also help to speed up your computer. If your computer supports Serial ATA I would strongly recommend upgrading to that.

Operating system: There are a few things you can do to your operating system to help the hardware.

-Remove programs that you don't use, these programs will be cluttering up your system.

-Make sure you have lots of free space, If you don't have much free space it will cause problems with your system.

-Stop programs from auto starting when your computer starts, these programs will take up a bit of your memory.

-Run defrag, this will re-organise all the files on your hard-disk for optimal use

Article at http://www.computing-forums.com/computer/
things-you-can-do-to-speed-up-your-computer-47.htm

Jason Barrett http://www.computing-forums.com