If you want to speed up your computer, the first place to look is at your hard drive. The hard drive governs how fast your data is accessed. If your hard drive is slow, your system will be slow, it's that simple.

Generally, I recommend that you buy a hard drive with a speed of no less than 7200 RPM and make sure it has a fast cache (the cache is an important factor in determining how fast the data is transferred).

One big thing that will improve your performance is to add one or two extra drives. Consider using a dedicated swap drive. When applications exceed use files that exceed your memory, a swap drive is used. The default is the C:\ drive which is used by Windows and many other applications.

For a swap drive (or a system drive), a 10,000 RPM hard drive is an option, though you may run into cooling and noise issues. Another option is a Solid State Drive. Either one of these options will increase the speed in working with large files. The last option is a 7,200 RPM drive (with a fast cache) for a swap drive.

If you use Photoshop CS4, a dedicated graphics card with plenty of RAM on the card can also boost your performance considerably.

Note: These act as bottleneck and will slow your system down. An external drive is good for data backups, though, which is how I use them.

Another consideration is making sure to defrag your drive, but that's the subject of the chapter on Diskeeper Pro.

© Nathan Segal