13 Tips, Tricks And Secrets To Boost Your PC Gaming Performance

9. If You Don't Have An SSD, Defrag Your Hard Drive

You know that horrible crunching, grinding sound your PC makes when it's thinking really hard? That's the sound of your SATA hard drive's actuator - a little mechanical arm that's moving across the disk hundreds of times across the spinning disc of your drive to access data each time you do something on your PC. Sounds like a pretty archaic process, right? Like something out of a steampunk novel. In order to minimise on the noise, and improve your game loading times by increasing your hard drive's efficiency at reading and writing data, you should defrag your hard drive at least every couple of months. Yep, you probably remember defragging from the 90s, but it's still used today for people using standard SATA hard drives. Defragmentation essentially organises your files under the hood, making sure that all the pieces of individual files are stored together, so the hard drive doesn't have to search far and wide to piece together file fragments. Windows has a built-in defrag tool that you can access by clicking Start and typing 'defrag'. However, a faster and more efficient way to do this is by using a free program called Defraggler.