How to Make Your Old PC Run Faster for Gaming

As you would probably know by now, my brother and I use pretty decent systems to test out games for performance issues and corresponding solutions. Just last week, however, we decided to make use of our old and outdated PC to try and experiment if we could still run some modern games on it. Here are our old PC’s specs.

Relatively Old PC System Specs:

CPU: Intel Dual Core E6600 3.06Ghz 2MB Cache
RAM: 1GB DDR2
HDD: 160GB SATA
Graphics: AMD HD4650 1GB DDR3 128-bit

Not that bad, but considering all the games out now, this rig is totally screwed. It can’t even play SWTOR, nor COD MW3 or ME2 due to the sluggish CPU and RAM. You might not have as slow a PC as this, but keep reading as you may want to try out some of the methods here.

How to Make Your Old PC Run Faster for Gaming

What we did first was to format everything and put Windows 7 on it. Big improvement obviously, as Windows 7 can significantly cut out some of the processing inefficiencies of its older Vista (ugh) and XP counterparts. The tricky part is what comes next.

We installed the necessary anti-virus software, browsers, standard codecs, etc., and then finally some games. We were able to play TF2 for about a week on low settings, but after such time there was some notable lagging and lowered PC performance. We figured that the main problem remains to be the outdated CPU and lack of RAM which is taking some toll on the system.

Here are some of the things we did to free up some CPU and RAM power:

We tried to tweak and clean up the registry as much as we can, manual method.
Defragged the main drive. Problem was, after defragging some drive parts remained untouchable.
Optimized startup items, might be difficult for non-technical users.
Removed possible malware through the anti-virus program.
Ran a disk check (native Windows 7 function).
Removed junk files and folders.

There were actually a lot more mix of tweaks that we did (might be too tech/advanced/risky for our regular readers), but ultimately they did not work out.

…Until we stumbled upon this nifty piece of software and ran the tools in it. THEN we were able to play some decent TF2, COD MW3, L4D2 (BF3 still won’t run though). We were actually impressed with the results.

Called Advanced System Care PRO, it actually does all the stuff we mentioned earlier and more. Compared to what we did, running this monster of a utility is as easy as pie, and it does it all WAY better. True and deep scanning, defrag, startup optimization — you name it. Good thing is, you can try it for FREE. You can get the trial here.

If you’ve got some pizza money saved up, we recommend you go on a diet and purchase the PRO version, which will allow you to do a professional system optimization of your PC plus get free updates from IObit using their cloud database (these updates include game compatibility fixes which you cannot get from illegal copies, by the way).

Here are some of the PRO features that particularly worked for us:

Deep Care

Deep Care consists of in depth Malware removal, registry fixes, defrag, and optimization — This set of PRO features to me are the most valuable, as they do all the nitty gritty maintenance tasks without you having to note all of them and worrying about making mistakes in deleting or modifying some of the registries.

Toolbox

The Toolbox makes it easy for power users to conduct all the needed tasks with more control, so for example we had to adjust some registries on a per-game basis.

Turbo Boost

The Turbo Boost feature is a really nifty quick-fix tool in case crap hits the fan. During times when we didn’t know what the frog is going on on our old PC, we just hit Game Mode and bam, we seem to just be able to play games. Pretty nifty.

These features are not bad at all — no actually, make that “really good stuff.” This beefed up my old PC in a matter of minutes, so far it’s keeping it that way.

So, if you’ve got a pretty decent if not slow PC, don’t throw it away. Do a fresh install of Windows 7 first and run some of the tips we mentioned above. Or do what we did, and just get Advanced System Care PRO to keep your PC optimized.

Good luck!