| Brian Cryer 2006-09-24, 7:00 pm |
| "ship" <shiphen@XXXXXXXXXX> wrote in message
news:1158918685.692148.88760@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>
> Hi
>
> I need some advice - how can I make my PC go faster!
<snip>
> Main applications: WindowsXP Pro (SP2), DreamWeaver 8, Outlook2003
>
> I WAS thinking of replacing the processor with a DUAL-CORE chip.
> But I have been largely talked out of it.
> Looking the WindowsXP "Task Manager" Performance monitor
> it seems that for most of the time the processor is barely being
> used - it's mainly DISK ACCESS that is so slow.
If you are sure that its the disk you are waiting on (and a simple way of
telling this is how long are you waiting when the disk light is on), then a
faster disk will help. The disk spindle speed is a good indication of the
overall disk speed (although other factors do come in, such as number of
platters). Your disk is 7200rpm. Almost every disk in a pc these days is
7200rpm, but if you hunt around you might be able to find a faster one - but
remember that a 10,000rpm disk will only give (on paper) just short of 40%
speed increase, the reality is probably that unless you are waiting for a
LONG time then you are not likely to notice much of an improvement.
Given that you have 2GB of RAM, how much of that does task manager report as
being used? I find a good indicator is the page-file usage (PF Usage in task
manager), if this is well below the amount of physical ram then you won't be
swapping and adding more RAM won't help. If on the other hand the page-file
usage approaches 2GB or goes above then either look into whether your pc can
take more RAM (most can't, although XP will support up to 4GB) and whether
you can move your page file to another disk.
> The WORST applications for slowing up my PC seem to be
> Outlook2003 and Dreamweaver. (I have already done what
> I can to shrink the files that they are using...)
>
> SCSI?
> Should I change or add another hard disk?
> If so how much faster would a SCSI hard disk be?
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that whilsst SCSI disks generally
spin faster and have better support for multiple disk accesses, that the
performance of SATA is often at least as good - certainly unless you do your
homework and come up with a clear case (or have shed loads of money to
spare), migrating from SATA to SCSI isn't likely to yield any noticable
returns for you.
Hope this is useful.
--
Brian Cryer
www.cryer.co.uk/brian
|