How to Add Computing Power to Your Work Computer

In its purest definition, computing power is the measurement of how many processes your computer can run simultaneously. Supercomputers are given a lot of power because they have complex math computations to complete. Computer processors are measured in gigahertz, meaning your average computer is sending billions of electrical impulses per second. Supercomputers use multiple processors and therefore compute quickly. The computers consumers use, however, are much cheaper and therefore come with a fraction of the computing power of a supercomputer. You can take some easy steps, however, if you want to speed up or improve your work computer.

• 1

  Defragment your computer. You don't know how many employees used your computer before you got to it. By defragmenting the disk space, fragmented files will once again be united, which allows the computer to run faster because your hard drive only has to look in one place for a certain file, instead of jumping around collecting pieces from all over your hard drive.

• 2

  Clean up your disk space. Disk speed begins to slow down as your computer's hard drive begins to reach capacity. Use Windows Disk Cleanup to purge unwanted and useless files. Also, uninstall any programs you no longer use regularly and delete or archive old files you don't need to access often.

• 3

  Boost your computer's performance with Windows ReadyBoost. Unless you're the IT guy, most companies don't like you fiddling around with their computers. So, while you can't add physical memory to your machine, you can use ReadyBoost, which provides an external jolt to your computer's memory. ReadyBoost works by making a USB flash drive a temporary dumping ground for all the extra files that your computer needs to run, but doesn't have space for in memory. And since ReadyBoost operates from a flash drive, you won't have to worry about getting in trouble for opening up your machine and switching out components. However, this feature only works with Windows Vista and Windows 7.