If you type that into Google you will get several million hits (411,000,000 to be precise).

Lots of these will link you to oceans of snake oil products that claim to solve all your woes with the click of a mouse button?

All I have to say about that is:

1. Fools and their money are soon parted
2. If it were that easy, wouldn't the OEMs have included it, given how much of their profits are taken by help desk functions?

Anyways, on to what I wanted to start this thread with...............

How do you know that your computer is running slow, or slower than it did?

I have just acquired a 22" FST widescreen HD monitor. I hooked it up to my general purpose machine and was not pleased with the compatibility.

I replaced the old PC with one booting Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit. That seemed to accept the monitor, loaded its management software and work just fine.

I set up the old 4:3 17" FST screen attached to the original PC right next to the new one. The old PC has Windows XP Home, and had loaded all the new screen software when I tried it on that.

After a couple of days, the XP box seems to be running slowly...........noticeably so.

Well I guess I know the reason:

PROCESSOR: 1.8GHz Single Core Athlon 2200+ (256KB L2 cache)
RAM: 1GB DDR1 266MHz Single Channel
VIDEO: Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB RAM
HDD: Western Digital 120GB 7,200rpm PATA

AGAINST:

PROCESSOR: 3.3GHz Quad Core Phenom II BE (4x512KB L2 cache)
RAM: 4GB DDR2 1066MHz Dual Channel
VIDEO: Radeon HD5670 512MB VDDR5 RAM
HDD: Samsung 1000GB 7,200rpm SATA II

My point is that your perception of these things is based on your experience, so if something happens to change your experience (new computer at work, new laptop etc.) then your perception will change along with it.

I just thought that I would mention this as I have had several people complain to me that their PC had started to "run slow" when that didn't seem to be the case. They had just had first hand experience of something more modern and faster.

So don't go buying people snake oil for Christmas


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