System speed test

In order to increase the speed of your system you must first know how fast it is. You can break system speed test into 2 categories: testing your internet connection and testing your hardware.

Testing your internet connection

Testing your internet connection it is done between your home PC system and a nearby server. You will be measuring your bandwith(kb/s) and your ping (ms). Your bandwith is how much data you can move over your line in kilobits per second. Your upload and download load bandwith will probably be different, with the dowload one being higher. Most people only need about 500 kb/s a higher end user might want 1,000 kb/s. Your bandwith is important when downloading large files, such as movies.

The other factor is your ping. This is the time it takes for a packet of data to travel to the server and back. You want your ping to be 10-100 ms with lower being better. Your ping is important when you play online games.

You can test your internet connection speed for free at SpeedTest.net

Testing your PC speed

There are several pieces of hardware which affects your system's speed and performance:

• CPU
• Hard Drives
• CD-Rom
• DVD player
• Sound card
• Graphics card
• RAM
  

There are software programs available to test each of these. The software can then compare them to bench marks in their class. Which will tell you whether something needs to be replaced.

The software that does this for free is not as good as the ones that you pay for, but here are some options:

Fresh Diagnostics

Test my hardware