Christmas and New Year gift: Boost your PC without upgrading hardware (Part 1)

It’s time for Christmas, are you wondering to buy some gifts for your friends as well as yourself? Perhaps your budget is limited, and you want to boost your PC, give the old PC a second life…

That’s all right! Definitely you can do it with low-cost or even no-cost. In the series of posts you will learn how.

As the Part 1 of series, this post will help you to improve CPU responsibility and optimize RAM usage, fundamentally boost your system running performance.

• Section A: Improving CPU responsibility

Nowadays, with the help of GPU provided by graphic cards, it seems that CPU is no longer so important. But if you are using old computer with single core CPU, it is still a critical factor that affect system performance.

Use Windows Built-in Utilities

If you are running a CPU demanding process, for example, PowerDVD, then you can select a higher priority for powerdvd.exe.

Windows Task Manager

Be caution! Don’t set the priority to realtime, or your system may lost response.

What’s more, some Windows Services running on the background can also consume unnecessary resources.

Deploy Powerful Third-party Software

Considering it too complicated? Don’t worry, you can install and deploy the third-party shareware to process them automatically. I will recommend 2 excellent tools below.

For low-end multi core systems, you can refer to Ashampoo Core Tuner, which enables you to use the full power of all your cores.

Ashampoo Core Tuner

With Ashampoo Core Tuner, you just need to select Auto-Optimize to optimize all the programs you are running or Boost to give more power to a single program. You can also fine-tune individual processes, display a live view of the current workloads of all your processor cores and enhance the overall performance of your system with additional tools.

For single core systems, Process Lasso will be your best choice, it has so many useful advanced features, and you can keep it for free (Some pro features limited, nag screen).

Process Lasso

Process Lasso will make your PC operate more smoothly by dynamically re-prioritizing running programs. When a process starts to monopolize the CPU(s), it is temporarily reduced in priority so that it does not bring your system to a stall. What’s more, you can choose what priority and what CPUs any process should be given each time it is launched.

• Section B: Optimize RAM Usage

Still using small RAM? No matter how large the page file you have set, virtual memory cannot replace the physical ones, and you may suffering from continuously hard drive activities, which leads low performance.

If you don’t want to increase your memory currently, there are some ways to optimize it.

O&O CleverCache is a unique tool that optimizes the File Cache Management for Windows Operating Systems. Simply install O&O CleverCache and you’re ready to go. It automatically recognizes your configuration, and within five minutes you can unlock the hidden resources on your Windows system.

O&O CleverCache

In addition, if your Windows has launched more than several days, you can simply restart it, or use MemCleaner to cleanup the unnecessary services and application fragments that occupied system memory.

MemCleaner

Want to know more? Please look forward to Part 2 of the series.

Merry Christmas!