Slow Computer?

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

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? :rolleyes:

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: :D

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 :drink:


.

Half way into reading your thread I started think the exact same thing.

Often times you don't realize how fast a pc is untill you use a slower one.

Download speeds for Pron are the same on both computers.

What does it matter....lol

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Download speeds for Pron are the same on both computers.

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Indeed! but I am sure that you will have noticed that the newer machine has a 1000GB HDD as opposed to 120GB ;).................. and the playback is a lot faster :D

EDIT:

We have an old Dell Dimension 8100 in the corner of this room. It runs Windows 2000 and supports legacy hardware and software, in particular a flatbed scanner, laser printer, and MS Office 2002 (XP) which are mostly used by my wife. She has commented several times that it is "running slower", although I am unable to detect this or think of any reason. The hardware is static and Office is not being updated. I put it down to the fact that she has mostly been using Office 2010 Professional Plus on an AMD Athlon 2.1GHz Dual Core laptop with 3GB DDR2/800 RAM, running Windows 7 Home Premium.

Never actually thought about it like this Nihil , +1 for this :).

80 gig drive here.
That filled up in 2001.
Since then its been a battle to burn as fast as d/l's.

Now i have 1 terrabyte external drive.
Still running the same system since 2004 approx.

When it gets slow it gets formatted.
Celeron 2.20Gig...224mb of ram. Win XP ProSP3
Sony 16x cd writer from yr 2000 that has churned out some 1000's of disks.
Sony could be impressed its still going strong..lol

I find this runs as fast as the wife's Azus 2010 laptop with Vista on it.

224mb ram :eek:

I've got an old creative CD burner that still works perfectly. :) It's out lasted numerous reader/burners... Unfortunatly they dont build things to last in this day in age. :mad:

The only problem is that now i've got brand new equipment, and the box PC motherboard doesn't even have IDE connectors. :( it's all sata plugs. So it's been relegated to the cupboard to retire.

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224mb ram :eek:

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224 + 32 onboard video = 256 ;)

A couple of years ago I did a database development for a local company. The design and development I did offsite, but the implementation and UA testing had to be done onsite.

I was given a Celeron 667MHz with 128MB of SD RAM. 32MB of that was taken by the onboard video. The OS was Windows XP Pro.

Now that did run in a "slightly leisurely" fashion. :D

@ Info_Au,

If I were you mate, I would make sure that I had a backup replacement for that 80GB drive, and an extra stick of RAM.

As for Vista.................... that one is a law unto itself, it seems to work OK on some hardware platforms and badly on others. I would look to replace it with Windows 8 next Christmas.

The public Beta test version is due out the back end of February 2012 so you can try before you buy.

From a user viewpoint it is just an improved edition of Windows 7, but there are internal differences, such as the 350MB hidden partition.................

Cheers,
:)

sysmon for *NIX and Performance Monitor for Windows. (sysmon will work on MAC's)

I use the tools at DNSSTUFF for internet speed testing (not just the free speed test) and tracert / ping for networking. (Used from switch-router (hops) to computer))

Hi there dino~, howzyakeepin?...........long time no see :(

Have you got a link for "Performance Monitor" that you mean? I know that if I Google I will get millions of hits on the subject matter.

Seasonal greets,

:)

In Windows 7 right click on My Computer and choose manage. Pick "Performance" from the left hand list. I believe it's the same in XP But windows 7 has added a few bells and whistles

Performance Monitor is great when used with performance logs since the data can be played back locally or via browser and/or forwarded to other apps as it happens.

I had it set up on my old server to forward selected performance counters to MRTG that in turn made pretty graphs that I inserted into a web page. It provided current, weekly and yearly utilization graphs of each resource plus the network counters from my router. There are hundreds of performance counters in Windows that can be selected with a click.

Here is a single graph from Tobi Oetiker's MRTG site.

http://www.antionline.com/images/ieimages/2011/12/1.png