Re: [CGUYS] When to buy a new PC?
At 09:35 PM 7/12/2008, you wrote: 1gig of RAM isn't likely enough and is the primary cause of your delays. Double it or remove some of your startup stuff. you are at least 1 gig short of a full deck, maybe more. you may have to buy a pair of 1 gig chips if that machine only has two slots. * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
[CGUYS] When to buy a new PC?
I have an older Dell XPS Gen 2 computer with Windows XP Home --3 GHz Pentium 4, 1 Meg DDRAM, about 1.5 terabytes disk drives, about 250 GB internal: the rest external. Very, very many applications, most used frequently. These include graphics, video processing, mathematical processing (e.g., Matlab), but not many video games. I've noticed that the computer has slowed down a lot from the original purchase 5 years ago. The main reason for slow down is (I think) the disk drives. The internal disk drives are all SATA (about 250 GB). Mostly I have to wait for the drives to complete operation to get a response on any application, such as browser or word processor. I have already checked to see if disk caching, SMART, and disc test software can find a problem, but these report none. If I buy a new computer, will the disk delay be expected to improve significantly? * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] When to buy a new PC?
1gig of RAM isn't likely enough and is the primary cause of your delays. Double it or remove some of your startup stuff. You can probably speed things up tremendously by reinstalling the OS; certainly as much as a new computer, anyway. There have been no big improvements in SATA lately, so that's probably as fast as you can do disk-wise with a new machine. For single threaded apps that's still a fine machine, but for video and math you may want to get one of the newer multicore cpus. For apps written to take advantage of them, like most video apps, they'll speed up rendering 2X or 4X. But you'll still be *editing* at 1X! :( On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Robert [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have an older Dell XPS Gen 2 computer with Windows XP Home --3 GHz Pentium 4, 1 Meg DDRAM, about 1.5 terabytes disk drives, about 250 GB internal: the rest external. Very, very many applications, most used frequently. These include graphics, video processing, mathematical processing (e.g., Matlab), but not many video games. I've noticed that the computer has slowed down a lot from the original purchase 5 years ago. The main reason for slow down is (I think) the disk drives. The internal disk drives are all SATA (about 250 GB). Mostly I have to wait for the drives to complete operation to get a response on any application, such as browser or word processor. I have already checked to see if disk caching, SMART, and disc test software can find a problem, but these report none. If I buy a new computer, will the disk delay be expected to improve significantly? * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
Re: [CGUYS] When to buy a new PC?
Jkdefrag is a free defragger that is much better (and faster) than the native defrag utility. I use it on my XP machines. http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/ Also, XP SP3 is said to have a 5%-10% performance improvement over SP2. Defrag before applying the service pack. -Original Message- You can probably speed things up tremendously by reinstalling the OS; certainly as much as a new computer, anyway. There have been no big improvements in SATA lately, so that's probably as fast as you can do disk-wise with a new machine. Try refreshing the drives by running the Windows defrag utility. Run the error checking utility first. Note how many programs you have open at once. See what happens when you keep the number to a minimum. * ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *
