Question: Howd you make a computer faster?

Andy Hearn answered on 8 Jan 2015:

Many people, hardware engineers, component designers, are trying to speed up how the CPU (the brain of the computer) gets stuff from RAM (the working memory) and from long term storage (like hard disks or solid state drives), as this is the thing that prevents computers from being ultra-fast. This is because the CPU often is waiting for the next bunch of stuff from the memories before it can do the next task.

If you want to make your own computer faster, it depends on what kind of hardware it has, and the operating system (the thing that allows you to run different ‘apps’ and other stuff without having to restart your computer for each ‘app’).

Often older computers are just fine with a Linux based operating system on it (Linux is brilliant!).

Microsoft Windows are well known for slowing down after a while because a vital file – called the registry – that Windows needs to run, grows over time (that isn’t a very good piece of engineering eh?!). There are some tools (like ‘apps’) for Windows which can let you safely sort the registry out to make the computer a bit faster again.

Computers slowing down could also be down to many different reasons, one of them can be due to viruses 🙁 Some viruses are bad enough that the only solution is to reformat the hard drive, and re-install the operating system 😮

Linux doesn’t have viruses like Microsoft Windows has! 🙂