How to Improve Computer’s Speed with Software Changes

So, there are many applications which say that they can improve your computer’s performance, but they don’t. However, what this article is about is not an app that can help you, it is a modification to the Operating System.

This modification is called zRAM. It is an improvement to how RAM is handled by your computer. I will get into how it works later. However, zRAM is how Chrome seems to run so quickly on Chromebooks but is a pain in the neck on other Operating Systems.

What You Will Need

• A computer with at least the amount of RAM that is required to run the Operating System that you run.
• The computer must be running Ubuntu Linux or some version of Ubuntu (such as Pop! OS). (Windows 10 already has semi-zRAM installed)
• An internet connection

How zRAM Works

First of all, we must get into the question of: What is zRAM and how does it speed up your computer? The answer is actually quite simple. On a normal computer without zRAM installed, when a process is put into the background, the RAM is stored on the hard drive to save memory. This means that retrieving the RAM when it is needed to put it back in the RAM can be incredibly difficult.

However, zRAM has a fix for that. What zRAM does is instead of putting the RAM for background tasks on the Hard Drive, it instead compresses the RAM and keeps it in the RAM. This means that, although it still uses a bit more RAM, zRAM makes the system faster by not having to read and write to and from the hard drive all of the time.

How to Install zRAM

Installing zRAM is actually incredibly simple. All you need to do is install the modification, and then reboot the system. Here are the two commands that do that:

sudo apt-get install zram-config
sudo reboot

Now you’re done. You have installed zRAM. That’s it. You can go about your day with a significantly faster computer now.