5punk

These days I'd rather play games and fiddle with software than learn about how to get the most out of my PC, but I'd still like to get the most out of my PC.

I'm not too bothered about overclocking because the idea doesn't appeal to me that much. Due to the extra heat and the additional cooling required, my PC has to be fairly quiet. And there's the stability concerns and I'd like my PC to just work without frequent messing about. But I'm not going to totally rule it out.

Can you give me any pointers to fairly basic things I should be looking at rather than me wading through dozens of articles on the web? I'm not looking for reams of information just a nudge in the right direction.

Thanks. Brain Dump starts here...

edit: This is my hardware - http://www.5punk.co.uk/phpbb/viewtopic. ... 0709#80709

I'd suggest just doing the very basics.

newest drivers etc, get diskeeper10 (it has a fancy new very idle defrag)

Other than that, I don't really bother, I clean up occasionally, but that's about it.

http://www.nhancer.com/ can be good to horse older games to do AA etc properly.

Basically, I find an issue, I'll fettle to fix or improve, but often they're things that can't really be expected or prepared for.

If you fancy a fiddle (ooh-er) have a read of this tweak guide, I got bored after a few pages but there's a lot of useful stuff in there

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

mrbobbins wrote:I got bored after a few pages but there's a lot of useful stuff in there

That

Make sure you clean out temporary files regularly as if this gets too big it can seriously cripple a machine. Clean out temp. internet files, use disk keeper or schedule command line defrags for during the night or when you arn't using your pc...

erm...

other stuff too

I already do mostly of the obvious software things, CCleaner and Diskeeper FTW! I'll have a look at setting up scheduled clean-ups and idle defrags, good ideas. And check out those links tonight.

The OS should be in a pretty good state, a small OS partition with Documents and Settings and temp folders on a different partition. Also I'm quite obsessive about keeping drivers up-to-date.

Someone at work told me you can up the speed of modern CPUs without too much impact on power usage and heat due to generous safety margins, is this true?

spoodie wrote:Someone at work told me you can up the speed of modern CPUs without too much impact on power usage and heat due to generous safety margins, is this true?

Depends in large part on what CPU you have. If it's the fastest one available in that particular series, it'll tend to have less overclocking room than a slower CPU in the same range in my experience.

To a point, yeah, you'll easily get your cpu to 2.8ghz on stock voltages etc (while trying to maintain a cool/silent machine) otherwise, 3.2-3.4 is totally attainable.

any more than that and you'll probably see heat going up a little higher than you'd like.

Cleaning up your startup list is always a good idea, loads of programs add pointless things in there that just slow down your computer. Go start > run > msconfig > startup and basically untick anything that doesnt look like drivers or antivirus. Also empty out the start > programs > startup folder aswell. I only have 5 things running at start up.

mrbobbins wrote:If you fancy a fiddle (ooh-er) have a read of this tweak guide, I got bored after a few pages but there's a lot of useful stuff in there

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

This very much. It's a brilliant guide and has helped me loads. I can send it over if you want but you'll probably be best off getting it from the site for latest versions etc.

tandino wrote:This very much. It's a brilliant guide and has helped me loads. I can send it over if you want but you'll probably be best off getting it from the site for latest versions etc.

I've printed it off so I can read it on the train. I think I killed a tree in the process.

Dr fucking Watson. I was trying to find out where all the hard drive space had gone on my laptop, and I found the Dr Watson error log. It was 2.8GB. Needless to say, I've disabled the bastard now.

DR WATSON IS ON YOUR POOTER LAYING BIG LOGS

edit: like a lumberjack