In the next few articles, we're going to discuss some of the biggest hardware and software impacts on your computer's performance... consider these rules when purchasing, upgrading or maintaining a PC.

Performance Rule 1. Size Matters. As with so many other things, when talking about computer performance, size does make a difference, and so does age. While you don’t want to gamble your productivity on cutting edge gear and untried applications (see Performance Rule 2), it’s a pretty safe bet to say bigger, newer hardware will be faster and more reliable than old stuff.

With HARDWARE, big is good. When it comes to performance, there are three main contributing hardware factors. They are (1) processor, (2) hard drive, and (3) RAM. Upgrading one or more of these, especially if the computer in question is more than a couple years old, can really improve speed and reliability.

Processor. Upgrading a processor (when possible) is one of the cheapest, most effective things you can do to improve computer performance. If your processor speed is less than, say, 1.2 Giga Hertz (GHz), take the PC to your friendly neighborhood computer repair shop and ask them if its motherboard will support a faster processor. To determine your processor speed, right click MyComputer and hit Properties. Give it a second, and your processor type and speed will show up on the General tab.

Hard drive. One of the biggest operational bottlenecks happens when a hard drive gets more than about 90% full. Imagine that you have to put a bunch of stuff into a room (and your hard drive is that room). When the room is empty, it’s easy to find things and to put things away. But, when the room starts filling up, you have to spend time looking around for what you want.

This analogy helps explain why (1) uninstalling unnecessary programs, (2) running the Disk Cleanup tool, and (3) defragmenting (in that order) will improve a hard drive’s performance. It’s like taking out the trash and straightening up the room. In articles to come, I’ll give you the step-by-step on how to do these three things.

RAM. If you don't have enough RAM to run your operating system and applications, the system will begin saving less used information to the hard drive. This is called swapping. Swapping has a huge performance cost. So, if a PC has insufficient RAM, you’ll get a big bang for your buck by adding more. Adding RAM is about the easiest thing you can do to speed up a PC, much easier than changing a processor or a hard drive. So next week, I’m going to tell you exactly how to open up the case of your PC and add RAM.