No matter how great you laptop performs, there is a chance at some point down the line, you will wish that it worked a little faster. When this happens, instead of spending money on expensive upgrades or new machine altogether, here are some tips for improving the performance.

Fix Heating Issues

Check Laptop Vents

An overheated laptop will often lead to performance short-comings. To fix this, first ensure that the laptop vents are actually venting air and not clogged up with the dust. If there is not too much dust, just blowing on the vents should suffice. If that is not enough, simply employ a small brush to clear them out.

Fiddle With Windows Settings

Every Windows machine gives you the ability to customize how intensely the laptop fan works to cool its inside. Head on over to Control Panel > Power Options, choose any of the preexisting plans and click the ‘Change plan settings’ link next to the name. Click on the ‘change advanced power settings’ link and then from the drop-down pick ‘Maximum/High Performance’ option. Although this will adversely affect your laptop’s battery-life, it will also ensure that your fan is always working well to cool down your system.

Use A Cooling Pad

Okay, this is not as quick as the ones above, but it’s quite simple. Cooling pads have their own fans as well and help keep your laptop cool and also make using your laptop a more ergonomic activity.

Dropping The Resolution

As blasphemous as it may sound, sometimes, in order to get optimal performance out of any game, you will have to drop the resolution. Instead of fiddling around with the in-game AA, texture quality, Anisotropic Filtering, etc. settings, if you just push the game down to a lower resolution, you will immediately notice a performance jump at the expense of some visual fidelity.

Update Your Driver

You won’t believe how many lingering issues in games are caused because of outdated graphics driver. Both NVIDIA and AMD release driver updates regularly and every big game release is almost always accompanied by graphics driver updates. Unless you have turned notifications off, you will get prompts every time a new graphics driver update is released and we suggest you always keep your drivers tuned to the latest version.

Increase Page File Memory

So, Windows does this clever little trick of utilising part of your hard drive as RAM to store least used/unused running applications. This is called page file memory. If you constantly find your laptop running slow because of limited RAM, You can increase your page file memory to an optimal amount. While this may not supercharge your machine, it may alleviate certain issues if an acute shortage of RAM was crippling your laptop. Ideally the page file memory should give your RAM some breathing room, so pick about 25% of your actual RAM for Initial Size and double that amount for maximum size (for example, if your laptop has 4GB RAM, then set initial size to 1GB and maximum size to 2GB).

Keep Your Drive Optimized

Most laptops have only one hard drive. If that is the case, you should make sure that the partition on which your games are installed is regularly defragmented and scanned for errors. We suggest you defragment that partition at least once a month. If you have two hard drives, then you will definitely see a performance jump if you install games on the faster hard drive (especially if it is an SSD)

Buy More RAM

This is not quick and easy, but if you are desperate for a performance jump, then consider doubling your RAM. There is no two ways about it. A RAM upgrade (say 2GB to 4GB) will give you immediate and recognizable improvement.