Our work addresses the single-input single-output interference channel. The goal is to show that although interference alignment is suboptimal in the finite power region, it is able to achieve a significant overall throughput. We investigate the interference alignment scheme proposed by Choi et al. (IEEE Commun. Lett. 13(11): 847-849, 2009), which achieves a higher multiplexing gain at any given signal dimension than the scheme proposed by Cadambe and Jafar (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 54(8), 2008). Then, we try to modify the IA design in order to achieve enhanced sum-rate performance in the practical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region. Firstly, we introduce a way to optimize the precoding subspaces at all transmitters, exploiting the fact that channel matrices in the interference model of a single-input single-output channel are diagonal. Secondly, we propose to optimize jointly the set of precoder bases within their associated precoding subspaces. To this end, we combine each precoder with a new combination precoder, and this latter seeks the optimal basis that maximizes the network sum rate. We also introduce an improved closed-form interference alignment scheme that performs close to the other proposed schemes.