Mike Easter wrote:
> Tanel Kagan wrote:
>> Processor:
>> 2.40GHz Intel Celeron, 8Kb primary memory cache, 128 kilobyte secondary
>> memory cache
>>
>> Motherboard:
>> BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. P1.60 06/10/2004, Board: P4i65GV 1.0,
> Bus
>> Clock: 100 megahertz
>>
>> Memory:
>> 736 Mb RAM
>>
>> Hard Drive:
>> MAXTOR STM380215A 80Gb, two partitions.
>>
>> You can probably tell that this is not a high-end or new machine. I've
>> had it for a few years now and it's my general office workhorse. I
>> tend to run several applications at once, eg Word Processor,
>> Spreadsheet, Acrobat, Firefox, Outlook (and Windows Live Mail) and a
>> few others running in the background. Because time is precious it's
>> not an efficient way of working for me to keep closing and restarting
>> programs, rather I need to keep them open and switch in and out as
>> necessary.
>>
>> I am looking to upgrade the system so that (obviously) the machine runs
>> quicker generally. But more important than pure speed I sometimes get
>> system hangs when loading large files (some PDFs for example) and if
> the
>> machine doesn't lock up completely it can take a few minutes to "catch
>> up". Again, when running anything quite graphic intensive it can slow
>> right down. Web surfing is ok but again, the input (keyboard/mouse) can
>> be a bit unresponsive and stutter with some pages. By the way I'm
>> using an onboard Intel 82865G Graphics Controller rather than a
>> dedicated card.
>
> You are asking that Celery to do a lot.
>
>> My friend suggested a SATA II drive, but I'm leaning towards more RAM
>> and maybe a dedicated graphics card, perhaps even a new processor.
>>
>> Does anyone have any advice? Does my system have an obvious
>> "bottleneck", or "weak link"? I am inclined to believe that a faster
>> drive would benefit more in terms of overall data transfer (which might
>> be usual for the daily backups, although they happen during "downtime"
>> anyway), but that more RAM and a faster processor would help me more in
>> terms of switching in and out of applications and loading files.
>>
>> Can anyone advise whether my motherboard would support a faster
>> processor? Would a separate graphics card be worth it?
>
> Personally I would rather up the mobo/processor/FSB/ram than spend any
> money populating that board with anything. But, if you have a friend who
> is throwing out some old unused pieces and parts, if you offloaded your
> graphics to someone's castoff PCI card - gamers are always getting rid of
> lightweight cards - and your cpu to a genuine P4 instead of the celery
> you might tell the difference.
>
> The problem is that it is hard to find/purchase outdated parts like the
> P4 and a pci graphics card - that mobo won't take a pci-e - so, if you
> can't get those pieces from scrap places, it isn't worth buying them. I
> was recently looking around for an old AMD Socket A Athlon XP to replace
> an AMD Geode in an old mobo, and nothing turned up.
>
> Most likely the best thing you could do would be to survey your system
> and see if you are using up resources on unnecessary security issues like
> realtime virus checkers doing unnecessary tasks and such. And to be sure
> that you don't have some malware processes going on that are using
> resources. I agree with the task manager suggestion.
AND explore this, ANOTHER harddrive, one (the one in your box now, to
hold your programs, the other should be used to hold all your DATA, any
files that your programs work on, Disk I/O is vastly improved, and in
some cases you will even see the speed improvements.
I think most all your productivity programs have the option to set the
default folders where they look for your working files, and where to
save any working files once created.
|
Similar Threads
