Okay, so I was messing around with my computer today, trying to figure out how to make it fetch stuff faster. You know, like when you’re searching for something or opening a big file – that waiting time. I stumbled upon this “retrieval speed” idea, and it got me thinking.
First, I checked my hard drive. I mean, it’s pretty old, a regular spinning disk one. I’ve heard those solid-state drives (SSDs) are way faster, but I haven’t gotten around to upgrading yet. So, I figured that might be a bottleneck.
Defragmentation Time
Then I remembered my dad always used to “defrag” his computer back in the day. Apparently, it rearranges all the files so they’re stored in a more organized way, which supposedly speeds things up. So, I ran the defragmentation tool on my computer. Took a while, like, I went and made a sandwich and watched a couple of videos while it was doing its thing.
I went to the kitchen to get myself some drinks.I spent nearly 2 hours for this.
- Open my computer’s built-in defragmentation tool.
- Select the hard disk and click Analyze.
- If the hard disk fragmentation rate is high, start defragmentation.
Result:Honestly, I don’t know if it made a huge difference. I mean, things felt a little snappier, but it could just be in my head. Hard to tell.
RAM Check
Next, I thought about RAM. That’s the memory your computer uses for stuff it’s actively working on, right? I have 8GB, which I thought was okay, but maybe it’s not enough for all the tabs I usually have open (don’t judge!).
I opened up the Task Manager and looked at the memory usage. Whoa! It was almost always above 70%, sometimes even spiking to like 90%. That’s probably not good.I try to run some games.
- Open Task Manager.
- Observe memory usage.
- If usage is consistently high, consider adding more RAM.
Result: Definitely seems like I could use more RAM. When I had a bunch of Chrome tabs open and tried to open a big Photoshop file, things got really sluggish. So, more RAM is probably on my shopping list.
Background App Cleanup
Finally, I realized I had a ton of apps running in the background that I wasn’t even using. Like, all those little icons in the system tray. I went through and closed a bunch of them – stuff like cloud storage sync, update checkers, and some random music player I forgot I had installed.
- Check the system tray for unnecessary background applications.
- Close any applications that are not in use.
- Consider uninstalling applications that are rarely used.
Result: This actually seemed to help a bit! My computer felt a little more responsive after I did that. Less stuff competing for resources, I guess. And start games again.
So, that’s my little adventure in trying to boost my computer’s retrieval speed. It’s not exactly rocket science, but I learned a few things. Still thinking about that SSD, though…