Online gaming is fun. Lots of us love to just jump in and play some games with friends or random strangers online for virtual points. Personally, I’m an Overwatch guy.

Unfortunately, I’m one of the many people who suffer from having a rather… subpar computer. It’s not horrible, no, but with the increase in computational demands, you’ll find that it’s hard to make your little putt-putt muster enough juice to run some these fun experiences.

Well, from a person rather experienced in using a lower-end PC to run mid-high end games, here’s what you can do!

Close out all other unnecessary programs.

This one is pretty obvious.

Everything you do is taxing on your computer - for those who don’t have at least a quad-core processor (that’s four CPUs), you will find that opening up multiple programs makes your computer run more slowly than those with more cores. That’s because of CPUs essentially being the brains of the computer, and you’re partitioning more work on fewer brains.

So, the first thing to worry about is to close out of expensive things like web browsers, streaming programs, antiviruses, and other games not being played at that time.

Put antiviruses into “game mode”.
While this differs from program to program, most anti-malware or antivirus programs have a sort of background/game mode that makes it take up less resources on your computer while completing its tasks. Of course, its performance is stunted slightly, but you’ll be able to guard yourself while playing your favorite games.

Now, with that said, closing out of your antivirus works far better for performance, but you’ll have to reinitialize it.

Keep your task manager open.
While not directly helping performance, it does give you more control over the things going on with your computer. Using the task manager lets you kill any tasks that are most taxing on your computer’s resources. Use it to sort through any running tasks and end them if they’re taking up too much memory or CPU.

Now, with that power comes a warning: do not end anything pertinent to your system’s continued functioning. For instance, if you see a task called System, do not touch. It’ll only cause problems down the line.

Look up the various tasks running to see if you need that at that time, and end them as you need to.

Clean out your RAM.
There are loads of programs that will do this for you. Clearing out your RAM frees up space for it to be used. Do this after closing every game, taxing program, or web browser. This will give you more memory to work with, and keeps things from lagging too quickly.

Now, nothing beats actually buying more RAM, but this is a good temporary day-to-day solution.

Set priorities in the task manager.
This is the last and possibly most “technically involved” solution. When you’re about to play a game, setting its priority high in the task manager makes it run faster and because the computer will allocate more resources toward it.

To do this, simply open the task manager, right-click on the game’s task, click “Go to details”, right-click on it in the detail menu, go to Set Priority, and tick it to High. Say yes in the dialog box that comes up, and tada -- a faster running game.

This only stays in effect for its lifetime, so you have to redo this process every time you open it.

Now, beyond these, there are a myriad of ways that you can make your “gaming” computer run a little faster. Most things require money or more technically involved processes - everything here were ways that those who don’t want to get too deep into the nitty gritty can follow.