101 Ways to Hack your PC

HARDWARE HACKING
Hands-on hints to cool, squelch and improve your hardware experience.

16
Clean your fans – like this.

17
Reduce vibrations by adding siliceous washers to your drives, and insert a siliceous sheet between your case fans/PSU and case. If you’re going the complete silencing hog, encase your hard drive in something like the Scythe Quiet Drive, or SilenX Luxurae. www.pccasegear.com.au.

18
Add silencing foam to the sides of your case. A Spire Sound Pad pack will do well, and will set you back $20-$30 for two 40x35mm and two 40x18mm sheets. Depending on your case you may need more than one pack.

19
You can quiet down your DVD drive by slowing it to its read speed – if you can handle the slower transfers. The memory resident Nero DriveSpeed will help you, providing it supports your drive. Samsung, Pioneer, Plextor and Sony offer tools on their websites that allow you to select speed or quietness profiles for drives.

20
Update the firmware/BIOS for your motherboard, graphics card, optical drive and even hard drive where applicable. For optical drives, in some instances you can cross-flash with a different firmware to get extra features usually reserved for more expensive models, or hack firmware to modify things yourself such as setting DVD region coding to RPC1. Your friends in this area are Speedlabs, CDFreaks, www.rpc1.org and ala42.cdfreaks.com/MCSE. If you’d prefer not to muck with your firmware to enable RPC1, consider purchasing AnyDVD.

21
Update your drivers! This can often give access to new features or fix problems.

22
If your hard drives aren’t sitting behind a fan, consider installing one – most cases support mounting a fan at the front. Make sure that your drive doesn’t occupy the bay that aligns with the centre of the fan, or it will be sitting in the dead spot – you want as much air to travel over it as possible.

23
Free up your resources in the BIOS – it’s just tidy. Disable things you’ll never use, like serial and parallel ports. Turn off the On Boot Floppy Seek (or set the option to ‘None’ in newer BIOS’) if you don’t have a floppy. If you don’t use onboard sound at all, disable it and the MIDI port.

24
Rebuild your PC – make sure everything is inserted firmly and properly. Neaten up the cabling, buy some cable management clips, rounded IDE cables, anything that increases neatness and maximises air flow.

25
Lap your heatsink. This involves sanding down the base of the HSF for a smoother surface, to allow better contact. There’s a million tutorials on the Net, just Google ‘lapping heatsink’. Before you begin, you’ll want to clean up all the thermal interface gunk with Arctic Silver Arcticlean (clean your processor heatspreader too). When you’ve finished lapping, re-apply a thin layer of your thermal interface of choice.

26
If your PCI sound card is sharing an IRQ with another device, you may run into problems. Try moving it to a dedicated single IRQ PCI slot. Your motherboard manual should tell you which one is set up to not share interrupts. If all slots share resources with other components (say, the USB slots), use the one with the least shared resources, or disable the other resources through the BIOS if you’re not using them. Speed problems may arise with RAID cards that are forced to share IRQs.

27
If your mouse isn’t gliding like it used to, install Teflon ‘mouse skates’ on the bottom. Grab a professional fUnc/Everglide/Razer mousemat if you haven’t already.

28
Replace your normal screws with thumbscrews, for quicker access and removal.

29
Buy some external cable tidies for your keyboard, mouse and power cords – or consider going wireless so you don’t have to deal with the mess.

30
Grab yourself a Razer Armadillo/Mouse Bungie to stop unwanted movements through your long mouse cable. For the cheap, just anchor it under your keyboard leg.

31
Consider setting up a RAID5 array, or 1+0 – there’s no safer consumer level way to make your data secure.

32
Buy an Aeron chair – the ultimate in comfy!

It's a good idea to give your PC a clean every so often. And your screen. Oh, and your desk as well.