Operating system optimisation: performance

System optimisation is one of the best things you can do when you system feels a kind of sluggish and not running smoothly at all. There are a lot of other hardware factors are also involved such as maybe more RAM, a good graphics card, more memory etc. Still, this article will talk about scenarios where your system hardware are fully equipped to handles hard core tasks yet not acting the way it should be. In that case, system optimisation is your go-to task.

We have been covering how you could maintain and optimise your system in our other articles preceding this one. You can check them out to get more out of these, if not, you can read on this article and start from here too.

Options for performance

This is one of the ways you can tweak for optimisation in every version of Windows. The way is to set performance options. With performance options, you can basically configure your RAM, CPU, Virtual Memory or Page files. To go to this place, you need to go to ‘My Computer’ , ‘This PC’ or any other name you might have chosen and right click and select properties from the menu.

There, a whole new Windows will pop up for various of settings, you need to look for advanced settings. Now you will have a another box with few tabs like Computer Name, Hardware, Advance etc. From there you need to go to advanced tab. Here you will find such sections as Performance, User Profiles, Startup and Recovery. Go and click the button inside the performance named settings.

Customise your system

With a new box opened you will find 3 tabs, Visual Effects, Advanced and Data Execution Prevention. With the Visual Effects tab you can tweak some changes here that directly affects your visual aspect of the system, like animation for instance, in order to get some optimum performance for your system. This tab has more to do with the appearance of your system. Here you have 3 presets of radio checkbox (Circular checkbox) and one custom checkbox. Each of these checkbox contains the presets and the custom one lets you set your own settings. You can read the list of things that will be affected by each one of the presets. Simply check and uncheck to see how each of the preset affects your system. And if you are not satisfied with the presets, you can always make your own selection and once you are done just simply click apply.

Settings for the best performance

In case you are working on a computer whose system already struggling to support Windows, in that scenario, you can use the preset of ‘adjust for best performance’ can make a tremendous difference and the system should response way faster and quicker than before. It is advised to leave these settings alone for most part.

The possibilities of the Advanced tab

Now for the advanced tab, you will find it divided into two section. One is the processor scheduling and the other one is virtual memory. As for the processor scheduling, you can adjust your settings for best performance by either checking the programmes or background services. For the virtual memory, which works as a virtual memory in case you run out of RAM while working, this is also called page files. This is more like your secondary RAM. You can set it to certain amount of numbers there.

Data Execution Prevention

Now for the Data Execution Prevention (DEP ), This is like your safeguard but out of sight. More like a sniper as your body guard. DEP constantly work in the background in order to fight against various of viruses and malicious programmes. One thing to keep in my mind that this feature does not prevent any malicious programmes from being installed on your computer but just prevent from them from running on your system. Most of the viruses or any malicious programmes can not do any damage just being installed until they run or execute in any way.

As the name suggest, DEP prevent their execution. By default, DEP works only for critical operating system files living in RAM but this DEP tab can let you enable them for all running programmes. Occasional hiccups or great suffering you may find yourself into if you enable DEP for all programmes like Application crash, froze etc. Again, best if you leave these settings as their default state unless you really need to adjust these for some reason. You also have the control to exclude any programmes from the radius of DEP there.