Everyone wants a fast Windows 7 computer. This is especially true of people who play games. So the question is what makes a Windows 7 computer fast? How can you speed up your Windows 7 computer without paying an arm and a leg to increase speed?

Several things make a computer fast. The most important thing is to keep it clean. A new Windows 7 computer is like my 2 car garage in 1985. At that time it was helping 2 cars with no problem. Today he has no cars. There is no space because other things have been stored there.

The same is true of most computers today. When they were bought, they were fast because they had no software. Over time, the software builds up on the computer. The most egregious software is memory-resident software. We often use programs for a short time and then never again. However, these programs often have memory-resident components that slow down the computer. A clean computer is a fast computer. How to clean the computer is the subject of another article.

In this article, the focus is on what makes Windows 7 fast. So the first step is to measure the speed of Windows 7. There are benchmarks and diagnostic programs that measure performance and speed. While they do a good job, they are not the measure of what a computer user considers fast. For me, how fast responds. Windows 7 has a sensitive measurement tool called Windows Experience Index. It is a scale of measurement that goes from 1.0 to 7.9 currently. Newly purchased computers generally score in the range of 3.4 to 4.5.

To find the Windows Experience Index, click START, then point to COMPUTER, right-click (the other mouse button), and use the normal mouse click to open PROPERTIES from the bottom of the menu. the overall rating is displayed right in the middle of the screen. A click on the Windows Experience Index to the right of the overall rating number should reveal the rating for each of the Windows Experience Index categories.

The Windows Experience Index measures processor speed, memory speed, graphics card desktop performance speed, graphics card 3D gaming and business performance, and hard drive transfer rate. Rate your computer’s overall performance as the lowest score in any of these categories.

Today, many computers have quad-core processors running at 2.5 to 3.2 GHz with DDR3 memory. These systems typically score in the 6.9 to 7.2 range for CPU and memory speed. Generally, CPU and memory are not an important consideration in making a Windows 7 computer fast. My laptop with a 2.13Ghz dual-core Inter i3 CPU and memory works in the 5.9 to 6.1 range.

The disk drives in computers are Serial AT Attachment (SATA) drives. They rotate at 7,200 rpm. This is typically twice the 3,000 rpm that car engines run at. Notebook drives can run at 5400 rpm. High-performance drives run at 10,000 rpm. So why focus on rpm speed? A large part of disk performance is the time it takes to mechanically move the disk’s read / write mechanism. Part of that mechanical performance is the speed of rotation of the drive. Therefore, 5400 rpm drives are slower than 7200 rpm drives. Most SATA drives have a Windows Experience Rating of 5.6 to 5.9.

What remains is the performance of the graphics card. That’s the area that causes the Windows Experience Index to run in the 3.4 to 4.5 range.

How do we make our Windows 7 computer more responsive? Changing the processor and memory is expensive. They are probably already the fastest components. Changes there are meaningless. With Windows XP, increasing the size of your computer’s memory from 256MB or 512MB to 3GB or 4GB greatly improves performance. Most Windows 7 computers come with 3GB to 6GB of memory. Windows 7 64-bit Edition can use more than 6 GB. My computer has 16 GB of memory. However, most application programs are written to use no more than 4GB or memory. Therefore, most of the 16 GB memory is not used. Right now my computer seems to be using 10GB of memory. Increasing the memory size on a Windows 7 computer is unlikely to result in a noticeable improvement in responsiveness.

Responsiveness can be improved with a faster disk drive. This requires replacement of the disk drive. Two drives can improve performance: 1. Solid State Drives (no moving parts) and 2. High RPM Drives (10,000 rpm). Both types of drives are expensive, with Solid State Drives (SSDs) being the most expensive. Solid state drives also wear out over time (several years) depending on usage. The smaller the SSD, the faster it will wear out. SSDs are the fastest drives because they have no mechanical parts.

One floppy drive strategy is to get a small 128MB SSD that only contains Windows 7 and the application programs and put the remaining data on another larger SATA drive. Windows supports Windows paging files and the temporary files area. Windows constantly uses these areas to store and retrieve data while you work on your computer. Making the storage and retrieval process faster makes Windows more responsive. Word, Excel, Pictures, and Music files stored on another slower drive don’t make Windows 7 computer less responsive because we expect some delay every time we retrieve one of those files. My computer uses a 128GB SSD for Windows. It has a Windows Experience Index of 6.8. All my data is stored on 1TB SATA drives with 5.9 Windows experience. I have not yet tested 10,000 rpm drives to determine your Windows experience rating. The Windows Experience Index is not published for any drive because it depends in part on the motherboard and CPU that the drive is connected to.

The last area is graphics cards. Because they score low on the Windows Experience Index, they offer the most potential for improvement. Graphics cards are typically advertised with high-performance chips (chip sets) from ATI or Nvidia. They have graphics memory on the card. Fast graphics chips and more memory on the card can speed up and make games more responsive. They should make the 3D business and gaming graphics Windows experience index higher.

In contrast, a card with high 3D performance and low desktop performance, our computer may not make our computer as responsive as we expect. How we use our computer can also be important. In my case, I run four (4) monitors each at 1920 by 1200 resolution. So having two Digital Video Interface (DVI) connectors on one graphics card is important because I need two graphics cards to support all four. monitors. Configuring the cards for responsive performance requires the computer motherboard to have graphics card slots (Peripheral Connect Interface Express – PCI Express connectors) that run at the highest PCI Express speed (16X speed) from both slots simultaneously .

The final consideration is the memory interface of the graphics card. The interface can be 64-bit, 128-bit, 256-bit, or higher. Here, the bigger number is better. If you are a gamer and you get the best performing chips (chipset) in a graphics card that only has a 64-bit interface, your game performance may be lower than expected. Not being a game player (except for Solitaire), I may be wrong here. In the case of four monitors, a $ 100 card that has a 256-bit memory interface produces a Windows Experience Index rating of 6.8 for Windows desktop and 3D graphics performance. Finding a moderately priced, good-performance graphics card requires a look at the specs and specifically at the memory interface. Cards with a 320-bit or higher memory interface can be very expensive. In fact, some cost more than my motherboard, CPU, and 16GB of memory.

The last part of the performance is the network interface. Computers with a 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps interface are common. Few to no computers run at the original 10 Mbps Ethernet speed. Speed ​​is not that important here. Internet speeds are usually slower. Verizon FIOS speeds are typically less than 35 Mbps. This is below 100 Mbps for most computer Ethernet interfaces. So what is important to understand about network performance? It’s simple, when a network is down, a Windows 7 computer slows down at a slow rate. With a malfunctioning network interface (or any universal serial bus USB interface), it looks like someone poured liquid nitrogen all over the computer to make it freeze. This can also happen when the batteries in your wireless mouse run out.

Therefore, a responsive Windows 7 computer is determined more by the performance of the graphics card and the memory interface, as opposed to the speed of the CPU, the speed of the memory, and the speed of the drive. disk. Any network, USB, or mouse problem tends to stop everything. Keeping the computer clean of unused and memory-resident software also helps.

Pete the nerd
“Your friend on a technically challenged planet (s)”
(c) PD Moulton