How to Make Your Old PC Hardware Act Like a Brand New Super-Fast SSD

When your PC’s performance winds down to a slow crawl it’s tempting to toss your old hardware for a shiny new tablet or laptop, especially with the latest solid-state drive technology to run circles around your old hard drive’s speed, but that can be quite expensive. There are more cost-effective ways to achieve like-new PC speeds, and in some cases, even better speed than an SSD can provide.

“If a once-fast computer has slowed to a crawl, you can’t really blame the hardware. Sure, you may be able to improve speed by adding RAM, upgrading the CPU, or replacing the hard drive with an SSD. But none of those solutions–all of which cost money–address the underlying problem. Your hardware isn’t underpowered. It’s overloaded.”

Last month in PCWorld, Lincoln Spector explained how to speed up a slow PC without buying new hardware. Tips included closing resource-hogging processes, disabling auto-loading programs from startup, and multi-tasking less often.

3 Cost-Effective Steps to Get Your Old PC Behaving Like a Super-Fast SSD

Cleaning out Windows can help with your system speed but Raxco’s got some permanent speed boosters for your PC, and they’re inexpensive alternatives to buying new hardware or scrapping your old PC. They all address different areas of your system to provide multi-level PC speed improvement.

1. RamDisk Plus (Download a 14-Day Free Trial)

The ultimate immediate speed-boost. Create a single or multiple RAM disks on any Windows PC – including Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 – and use it to speed up everything you do. RamDisk Plus is also the only RAM disk software that can access and use RAM trapped above 3.2-4GB in 32-bit systems, so you get access to all that extra RAM — which would otherwise be hidden from your system and unusable — to speed up your PC.
RamDisk Plus gives you 50 times faster random read and write speeds on HDDs (PCs with traditional hard drives) – 10 times faster than SSDs! Solid-state drives are known for their amazing speeds…and high prices. So if you’re considering buying an SSD, you can get 10 times better-than-SSD speeds with RamDisk Plus without shelling out the big bucks.
*If you have an SSD, RamDisk Plus can help extend the life of your drive by reducing write amplification, redirecting writes to the RAM disk instead of your SSD.

2. PerfectDisk (Download a 30-Day Free Trial)

Fragmentation slows down drive performance on old and new PCs, including read/write speeds on HDDs and write speeds on SSDs. Fragmentation is an inevitable on all PCs. No system – not Windows 8.1, 8, 7, Vista or XP – is immune to it.
If your system is slow to open or edit files in photo editing or video editing software, document or spreadsheet programs, or you’re experiencing texture pop-in with PC games, fragmentation is most likely the culprit.
PerfectDisk, Raxco’s flagship defragmentation and optimization software trusted by thousands of power users and IT professionals, prevents fragmentation with zero impact on system performance and eliminates existing file and free space fragmentation with an intelligent, energy-efficient optimization strategy designed to reduce the rate of refragmentation. PerfectDisk ensures your hard drive or SSD is running as fast as it possibly can.

3. PerfectRegistry (Start Free Scan)

Some Windows registry cleaners are a dime a dozen, promising to speed up your PC and eliminate registry errors. PerfectRegistry is an aggressive registry cleaner, it will eliminate more invalid registry entries than your typical registry cleaner, and it provides a backup and restore feature that allows you to undo a cleaning but it also defragments your registry from the inside – a different type of defrag than PerfectDisk provides – and compacts the registry, resulting in faster boot times and generally quicker Windows operation.