After spending years with different types of laptops, you will understand some basic or even advanced performance hacks along the way. These lessons can make a huge difference in improving:
- overall performance,
- responsiveness,
- and battery life.
In this article, I will be using the OMEN as an example for how to implement these lessons. Improving performance will mean that you don’t need to sell your laptop and get a new one as often.
Know Your Power Plans
These days, laptops allow you to change your system behavior and performance easily on the fly through simple pieces of software. And by using these tools, your device can perform at a higher level.
For example, OMEN laptops have access to their whole gaming hub interface, which has many options. However, when dealing with performance, you will find several settings. This includes a balanced and performance mode, with a setting that will allow the fan to run at max speed.
Even though most laptops come out of the box with a balanced setting active, the difference between it and the performance mode is vast, especially in gaming. You will likely get a good bump in frame rate in performance mode as it favors GPU clock speeds. But regardless of the mode, most laptop hub’s dynamic power work with their tempest cooling design to balance out the performance.
Hacks presented in this article will not only improve performance but will also improve your laptop’s lifespan.
Conclusion: Performance modes will show their differences.
Lower Your Screen Refresh Rate
This step is taking a page from smartphones. It applies to users who spend too much time away from the plug with laptops at 60Hz and higher. With the HP OMEN 16, I improved battery life from about six hours with its default 144hz, to almost eight hours running at 60Hz. This will give you an extra hour in class or on a flight. Or when you can’t access the nearest power outlet.
However, most laptops knock refresh rates down automatically when running on battery mode. So, this might not apply to you. But for most laptops that do not have this feature, it will come in handy.
To do this:
- Click on your desktop.
- Hit display settings and scroll down.
- Select advanced display settings.
- You will find the refresh rate near the bottom.
Remember: Do not forget to reactivate a high refresh rate when gaming.
Conclusion: Lower frame rate for longer work periods.
Uninstall Bad Antivirus Programs
It would be best to uninstall programs like Norton or McAfee. There are some other free tools you can use to protect your laptop. The Windows Defender, for example, is free and versatile.
But if you need an extra layer of protection, you can go for Malwarebytes or Avira if you do not mind paying a little extra. Norton and McAfee most likely use CPU cycles to operate, while Defender and Malwarebytes do not take nearly as many resources.
Conclusion: Free anti-virus won’t slow your computer.
Use a Monitor or TV
One of the main benefits of having a laptop is having an integrated panel. But If your computer has a discrete GPU, having an HDMI or display port powering an external display has performance benefits. However, this won’t work if you are using integrated GPU graphics.
Most gaming laptops have their HDMI and display port connectors directly attached to the discrete GPU. While the laptop screen is connected through the integrated graphics. That means if you are using an integrated display, that fast GPU has to pass its data through the IGP slower frame buffer, which can cause a bit of additional latency.
Conclusion: For higher performance, use an external display.
Know Your Memory
Over the years, most laptop companies have been putting slow modules into their laptops, which has worsened lately. These are secondary timings you usually won’t see, and they are just as important.
Gaming is where you will probably see the most significant change when comparing the fast and slow memory modules; especially CPU limited games. The first thing to do is educate yourself about the amount of memory used in your laptop. This way you will see if there is performance is being left on the table. And if there is, the solution is to run your laptop memory with a kit that will run tighter at secondary timings.
Conclusion: Don’t lack performance by being misinformed.
Conclusion
Optimizing your laptop will make it run smoother. This makes tasks like gaming, content creation, video editing, and typing easy. There are other things to do when you want your laptop to perform better:
- Keeping your laptop clean
- Restarting regularly
- Reinstalling the OS
- Running fewer apps simultaneously
Once you implement all of the above steps, your laptop will run smoothly, giving you the best performance.
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