Expert advice from your fellow readers.
If you're a Tom's reader, then you must know your way around your computer pretty well. You may not be a master technician, but you're definitely among those who are computer literate – but nobody can know everything, which is exactly why we read (and create) websites like the one you're reading now.
Last month, we started a contest so that readers like you could contribute your knowledge to our Computing.net sister site and also have the chance to win some money.
Today, we're proud to present you with the winners and their very well-done how-to guides.
Taking home the grand prize is Douglas Crowthers of Lynchburg, OH, who now has $1,000 thanks to his guide for Solid State Drive (SSD) Tweaks for Windows 7.
William Harmon of Stockton, CA shared his overclocking experience with the Gigabyte Easytune6 software, which resulted in him pocketing $400.
On the hardware side of overclocking, Raymond Buckman, from Price, UT went in great detail about how to clean a water block. Believe it not, you need to use ketchup. For that, he's got $100.
Good work to everyone who entered. Keep it up!
How To: Stop Tom's posting US-only competitions on the UK site
In Step 6 he says to disable the PageFile completely.. Yes he says recommended for 4GB + of RAM, but I believe Toms did an article on Memory levels and suggested to leave the PageFile enabled unless you had 8GB or more?
Also, you may be better off just changing the PageFile to a secondary HDD as most SSD users will have a HDD secondary drive for data. Whilst this is not very performance friendly, it stops the likelyhood of an application crashing due to not being able to access the PageFile. Even if you set it to only 500MB-1GB..
The same thing applies to Step 11.
Overall not a bad guide, but not something that should be used at face value. The writer mentioned testing before and after Step 9. I would go so far as to test before and after every step. Some of these improved my performance, others did not. To be honest, windows had defaulted most of the settings to what the guide suggested.
My SSD - Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1
Software OC programs have a bad habit of bricking systems, and never actually optimize an OC. In addition, they just use generic guaranteed to work in 99% of cases settings that pump way more voltage into a CPU than needed.
Here are a couple of much better guides from 5 minutes of browsing through the site.
PC building Guide
http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/guide-to-building-a-pc/509.html
Network Connectivity Troubleshooting
http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/diagnose-and-overcome-a-network-connectivity-problem/556.html