Turn your PC into a supercomputer part two
jjones | Guides | 30/04/2008 16:36pm
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Turn your PC into a supercomputer part one
Part one in our guide to increasing the power of your PC.
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Your computer is a potential source of money – not just of income in the shape of earnings, but of reductions in your household outgoings. So much money, in fact, that you can make it earn its own keep.
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Never lose a file again in Windows Vista
Searching for files scattered across your PC used to be a nightmare – especially when you had forgotten to back them up. But those days are over thanks to Windows Vista.
6. Speed up your processor
Perhaps the most extreme way to turn your PC into a supercomputer is to overclock it. Simply put, this means increasing the clock speeds of various components beyond the manufacturers’ original settings. It’s not as dangerous as you might think, though: many motherboards are guaranteed to run at enhanced speeds, and today’s processors are very robust when it comes to accelerating them.
The speed of a CPU is derived from a multiple of either the Front Side Bus on an Intel system, or of the Hypertransport clock in an AMD one. The easiest way to overclock your processor is to increase these base speeds. Many motherboards come with a Windows Vista utility for this – Asus AI is a good example. If you don’t have a piece of software, though, you’ll need to make some BIOS changes. See tinyurl.com/2tyljj for how to do this.
POWER ON DEMAND Many motherboard overclocking tools have an automatic mode for an instant power boost
7. Free up system resources
The more programs you try to run at any one time, the slower your computer will be. There are many programs that run in the background all the time and these aren’t immediately apparent on your desktop. Some of them are essential to the operation of Windows Vista, but many – especially third-party ones – are not. “No matter how fast or shiny computers are when they’re new,” says Microsoft’s official advice page at tinyurl.com/29t5am, “they all seem to get slower over time.” To free the supercomputer within, you’ll need to pare these background programs back to a minimum. Start Windows Defender (Control Panel > Programs > Windows Defender) and select Tools > Software Explorer. This application will let you prevent services loading when the PC boots – simply disable those you don’t need. If you turn one off and your PC starts having problems, simply turn it back on again in the same screen.
CLEAN OUT Windows Defender can help you stop unwanted programs starting up whenever you log on
8. Upgrade your graphics card
“If you require more frames per second from a game,” says Paul Lee from Quiet PC, “then upgrading the graphics card is your best option.” If your processor is less than a year old, it’s probably OK with modern game engines. Many new PCs, though, are sold with low-end graphics cards.
Have a look at the Windows Experience Index for your PC. Are the graphics scoring low? For less than £150 you can buy a top-notch GeForce 8800GT or Radeon HD3870 3D card with 512MB of memory. This fits into the long PCI Express x16 slot on your
motherboard. It’s usually the top expansion port below the CPU fan. Fitting a new graphics card is easy: check out our guide at tinyurl.com/27ek5r.
THANKS, CARD The latest graphics processor will give your games a new lease of life
9. Enable advanced hard drive performance
Increase the speed at which your hard drive loads program data to the system memory with one simple tweak – but be warned, it does mean disabling certain settings that store information. If your PC crashes, you’re at more risk of losing data than if it crashes normally.
Open the Control Panel and navigate to System and Maintenance > System and choose Device Manager. Click on the plus sign next to Disk Drives, and select your hard drive. Right-click on it and choose Properties.
Under the Policies tab, you’ll find a check box for Enable Advanced Performance. Turn this on and click OK.
FAST SPINNER Crash protection keeps your data safe but slows the hard drive
10. Join the grid
If you decide you can’t turn your own PC into a supercomputer, why not turn it into a small part of a much, much bigger one? There are several ‘grid’ computing initiatives which take the time
your PC sits idle and puts it to good use, working on calculations for cancer research or analysing radio waves from outer space.
The most popular way to do this is to sign up for BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). At any one time, BOINC routines can have enough computers contributing to break the 1,000TFLOPS, or penta-FLOPS, barrier. To offer your computer’s services, download the software from boinc.berkeley.edu and choose which projects you’d like your PC to contribute
to. While the screen saver runs you could be fighting climate change or simulating the effectiveness of anti-malaria drugs.
WEIRD SCIENCE Look into BOINC screensavers such as Spinhenge@Home
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