If you’re playing on an outdated PC your dad found in the back of his garage, no worries. Right here you will find 10 free, quick & easy tips to improve your gaming performance. So sit back, and open up your brain tank because here comes some premium 97 knowledge.
1. Set battery to high performance
This first tip to improve PC performance will only applies to the laptop users among us. It sounds evident to do so, but some people forget (like I have, playing TF2 on 15 FPS on my 6 months old rig). So click on that battery icon on the bottom left, and when it shows options between “Energy Saving” and “Lenovo Dynamic Graphics”, I’d suggest you click the latter. Also, be sure to hit “More Power Options”, you never know if there is a hidden gaming option in there.
2. Improve your GPU PC performance by installing a Game Booster
What is a Game Booster you might ask? Wikipedia might say that it’s a software, designed to speed up your PC for faster, smoother, more responsive game performance. It does this by shutting down any obsolete programs running in the background, making your PC focus all its attention and power to the game you are playing. You can download a great Game Booster for free from Razer!
3. Clean up your PC
I recommend that you run this free little program called Ccleaner from the friendly people of Piriform every month. It fastens your PC by cleaning all areas of your computer, like your internet temporary files, history (always useful, hehe), cookies, etc. It also cleans old or unused registries which might hinder your performance. If all this sounded like jibberish to you,  just download the program, run it, and watch as 5-10 GB of crap gets flushed down the toilet that your PC has been holding back for years. He’ll thank you for it.
4. Updating your drivers
Drivers are computer programs that let Windows and your other applications interact with a hardware device. Basically, your hardware speaks Chinese, your software American, so to let them interact, you need a driver, who speaks both! Magic. If you want your driver to stay up to date to the latest language changes (this metaphor is running dry, but bear with me), you need to upgrade them once and a while. For gaming, the most important ones are your graphics card and processor drivers. You should always download them from the manufacturer himself! So here are some handy dandy links to NVIDIA, ATI/AMDÂ and Intel. If you’re not sure what hardware you are running, you can check it when you open Ccleaner, on the top.
5. Set graphics card to high performance
Look in your graphic card settings, somewhere in the 3D-settings most likely, and switch it from “High Quality” to “High Performance”.
This will increase your FPS, but decrease some graphical quality. On my laptop the settings look like the picture you see right above. This is different for certain video cards and I’m not sure where this will show up for your GPU, but I suggest you look into your properties somewhere.. Now if you’re ready, click the button down below for 5 more tips to improve PC performance!