6 necessary Tips to pace awake Windows – Make your windows running faster

You can't say computers cause more trouble than they're worth, because they're really quite useful. But that doesn't mean they don't cause a lot of trouble. Occasionally your computer gets slow, and you really don't know why or what you can do about it. The important thing is to determine what needs to be upgraded, and then you can decide whether or not you want to pay for it. Here are some pointers.

Hard Drive
Any time you find yourself waiting for the computer to do something, look down at the hard drive light. If it stays on during a large portion of your wait time, it's probably the hard drive that's slow. Unfortunately, chances are your hard drive isn't going to get too much faster. One option, if you have a RAID controller in your computer (either on your motherboard or as a separate card), you could add an additional drive of the same capacity, then create a RAID 0 (known as a "stripe") array with both drives. Basically what this does is have the computer alternate between drives when storing or retrieving information; with two drives, you're pretty much doubling the speed. (You can also stripe more than two drives to get faster performance, but at the price of having a lot of hard drives.) Besides that, your options for a faster hard drive are limited, since most hard drives today all have 7200RPM spin speeds, and only a few 10,000RPM drives are available for everyday use (look into Western Digital's Raptor series if you have the money for it).

Memory
Another thing you can do to help a slow hard drive is lower your system's dependence on virtual memory. Virtual memory is the portion of your memory stored on your hard drive. When the CPU needs access to virtual memory, it first has to be copied into your physical memory, meaning it has to wait on your hard drive. With more system memory, you'll need less virtual memory, and that will be an issue less of the time. And while we're talking about memory, the best way to put in memory is in dual-channel pairs (assuming your motherboard supports it). This means you put in two identical modules into designated slots to double your memory bandwidth (the rate at which you can transfer to and from memory). It's effectively the same idea as striping two hard drives.

CPU
One thing to keep in mind: there are very few cases where a CPU will actually slow down something you're doing.  In fact, if you monitor your CPU usage over a period of time, you'll see that it barely ever goes up to 100%.  One of the only mainstream activities you might see an improvement in is decompressing an archive, and even that is largely dependent on the hard drive, which we already decided is slow.  However, if you use CPU-intensive applications on your computer (like video editing, for example), there's no reason why a CPU upgrade wouldn't help.

Video Card
This is a big one, if you play a lot of games.  In general, games want a lot of CPU time, memory, and graphics performance.  Using more virual memory really just means longer loading times, so it doesn't affect the actual gameplay a lot.  The CPU decides what the screen has to show, then sends this information to the video card; it's the video card that has to decide how to draw it, and it has to be able to draw it fast enough to draw many frames every second.  As you can probably guess, the video card takes longer per frame than the CPU does, so usually the CPU is waiting for the video card and isn't used much.  Which brings us to the video card.  To a certain extent, better video cards correspond to proportionally better frame rates.  To get even more performance, use an SLI or CrossFire setup (this might require a motherboard upgrade - and with it maybe a CPU too).