I want to talk to you today about increasing the performance of your computer; the simplest ways. One of the best ways to increase performance; I am going to show you something on my computer today, that you’re going to want to check on yours.

Basically, one of the simplest most affordable ways to increase your performance is increasing the RAM, the Random Access Memory. Typically, you are going to see about 4 GB on your average entry level computers; some are going to have 2 GB; nowadays with the web and other types of multitasking that we are doing, we need much more than that. I am going to show you on my computer. First, I am going to show you how to check it on yours and show you mine as an example. One easy way to check, not only what your computer has for RAM, but how much are you using. That is going to give you an idea of do I need more memory.

Go to your keyboard and click three keys. This is a Windows PC so hit control, alt, delete (Ctrl + Alt + Del). When you hit those three keys you’re going to get a little message window like this one here; depending on the operating system it might look a little different. Go to your Task Manager you see down here. That’s going to open up this window. Move over to performance; mine opened up right in performance, maybe yours opened up an application, etc. Head to performance.

The top one is going to show you the usage of your CPU, which is your processor. If you are not really doing much, it should be kind of on the low side. If your computer performance is really, really lagging that’s another thing you can look at here. We are doing a lot of things on this computer. Programs are opened but this is a really high performance i7. That’s why you are seeing this low, but that’s not the point of this video.

The point of this video is this one here: RAM memory. This computer has 16 GB; remember the average entry-leveled computer stores about 4 GB and nowadays that’s just not enough. You need to upgrade your computer if you’re in that situation. Looking at my computer here, I am going to tell what’s going on.

I have anti-virus which everybody has; iTunes opened; two browsers open; I got Google Chrome with a few tabs opened; I have Explorer with a few tabs; when I say a few 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 – 9 tabs open in explorer and in Chrome I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 tabs opened. That’s because this is a screen we’re referring to on a regular basis. I don’t want to open and close screens. So we say about 18 tabs opened in the browsers. I have Outlook opened which is my email client; I got Photoshop opened here as well.

So even if I close that; the bottom line is if you are typical user and you got a lot of browsers open, you’ve got a lot of things going on. Look at my use here, I am using almost 9 GB of RAM in this scenario. This is how my computer is sitting pretty much all day. That’s what you want. We are talking about productivity, so if you are trying to be productive you want to have all the windows that you’re accessing on a frequent basis open. You might have some music in the background and you might have a couple programs opened; so if this computer had 4 GB it would be unusable! I’m using basically half and we are really not processing any major stuff.

I’m not playing any videos right here and I am recording this at the same time. So this is just a live example, I am going to throw out some more videos; show examples of a typical laptop without barely doing anything maybe opening up a Facebook page or something like that. You could see that 4 GB it just doesn’t cut it anymore, if you got a laptop with 4 GB bring it in let’s upgrade that to the max 8 at least 16 even better.

So that’s the point of this video here telling you hey if you got 4 GB you need to upgrade that also how to take a look at this yourself. If you got 4 GB and you’re keeping this at 2 or less then you are okay but you definitely don’t want this at 75% or greater. It is going to affect your performance but at the same time take a look at the CPU not a whole we can do about that as far as changing a CPU or on a laptop we should say. So that’s your tip for the day and basically what I’m telling you is upgrade the RAM, very inexpensive to do of course depending on your laptop and we can do it for you right here at PC911.

Have a Mac? Learn how to upgrade your ram