Monday, February 4, 2002		Article

Use latest drivers to increase efficiency
Vipul Verma

OLD habits die hard. It is difficult for anyone to change the basic habits and this is equally true for the computer users also. There is one common observation about the computer users that over a period of time their computer has slowed down considerably and in a majority of the cases a need is then felt for the upgradation. However in most of the cases the requirement is not of upgradation but more of fine-tuning. Upgrading to the modern system is not worth unless your work demands so. As with upgradation you do not add speed exponentially to the computer.

For example, if you have upgraded your system from 500 MHz to 1 GHz, this does not mean the overall speed of the system will double. In this case the net effect would only be near 50 per cent depending upon other upgradations. Though there is no doubt that the processing speed would increase by actual increase in the speed of the processor, yet since the instructions, which are being carried through the bus of the motherboard remains at 100 MHz or 133MHz, thus the overall impact would be far less than double, despite boosting the processor speed. Keeping this fact in mind, in case of system slow down, the best way is not to upgrade your system, but to fine-tune it properly.

Fine-tune

There could be many steps involved in fine-tuning, which are mentioned below:

To begin with, you should avoid installing junk shareware and freeware programs. However, if you have installed these programs on your system, and if they are not functioning, then as a priority, you must uninstall them either from within the program or from add remove program in Control Panel. If you are not able to uninstall, then you can use any third-party uninstaller to remove them. This way you not only clean up the registry, but also free up a lot of precious system resources, which can be alternatively used for other programs.

Secondly, now all modern operating systems, (barring Windows '95) are 32-bit application, at least. Try not using any 16-bit application on your system. It may work well but there could be some serious operational problems like memory leakage in case you continue using those 16-bit applications on the operating system. The common error messages include, system low on resources and insufficient memory to run this application. Removing these will surely boost the performance. However, if the program is very important then as the best option, you can use its latest 32-bit version.

The third, tip is related to the anti-virus programs. Today with terrorism in the cyber world becoming the order of the day with increasing risk of virus onslaught, there is a growing need of having an anti-virus program installed.

Normally, the programs are becoming as necessary as the operating system or the Internet browser, without which the computer could not even be imagined. However, there is a difference between the operating system (OS) and the Internet browser and anti-virus software. In case of most of the applications, like OS and Internet browser in the example mentioned above, you basically use the default settings and normally do not customise it much. However, this is not the case in case of anti-virus programs, mainly because the threat perception is different for various users. If your applications involve more Internet surfing and downloading from the Net, then you are more exposed to the risk of virus in comparison to the person, who does not use the Internet often.

Depending upon the threat perception, you must customise the anti-virus program and should not use the highest security settings, which involves checking of virus on boot up, loading anti-virus program on starting Windows, enabled auto protection etc. unnecessarily if you are not in high risk zone. Remember, the anti-virus program is one of the biggest causes of the slow down. You should not use more than one anti-virus program, unless there is such a need, because these programs consume a lot of precious system resources.

Drivers

After the anti-virus programs, the next important thing is to keep the drivers up-to-date with the latest releases announced by the company from time to time. Normally the use of latest drivers takes care of a lot of problems as they are made to address any reported problems in the previous versions. Also, the latest versions of the driver, increases the efficiency.

The next block holes in the system are the memory-based games. It has been mentioned many times that as far as possible, do not use memory resident games like Quake etc. as they drain out resources on the system and make it slow for other applications.

Disk free

The next important step in fine-tuning the system is to keep it free from trash and keep at least 20 per cent of the hard disk capacity free, though the least would be 10 per cent. This will ensure smooth running of the system. Keeping hard disk full is something that may cause trouble to your system. Though this is against the common habit, but you should make a deliberate attempt to keep your hard disk free. Last and the most important point is to run scan disk followed by defrag regularly.