As I replied to earlier posts, it is quite clear that having at
least 1gig of RAM would go a long way to speed up the process. No
can do, unfortunately. As I said before, I'll upgrade the system
in the coming year.
Henry,
When I build, modify, repair, upgrade etc PCs for friends and family I do run the Norton Performance Test that came with the 2003 version and presumably the other years versions.
It's interesting to see what happens to hard drive access speed when (mostly) playing with hard drive setup.
As installed by default with say, WinXP or Win98 or Win2000, the hard drive may have x megabytes per second write speed. Run the CD that comes with the motherboard to load the proper drivers for the various motherboard data busses and it usually goes to about 2x write speed. Compare that speed to using a newer hard drive with 7200 rpm and 8 meg buffer in the hard drive and the write speed may be about 4x compared to the default loaded system and the usual hard drives you find in most new PCs.
In my own case I have used Win98, Win2000 and now WinXP on a variety of system builds with a changing variety of memory sizes as I pop memory in and out to test. For me in all cases it seemed that 512 meg memory was necessary to run Paint Shop Pro 8 nicely for the usual sized files (60 megabyte film scans). If I did a big panorama stitch then things fell apart and it slowed down dramatically, it seemed that 1 gig RAM was desirable (now got that) - but I always found that hard drive was the main speed bottleneck. So the minimum for me now is always the 7200 rpm drive with the 8 meg buffer in it. Even the step from AMD 2500+ CPU to the AMD 2600+ CPU in the Athlon series made a noticeable difference in speed, because of an improvement in internals in the chips and not just the whisker of extra clock speed.
One problem is that WinXP is such a hopelessly bloated operating system that it seems to need a minimum of 256 meg just to run the system, then if you actually want to run an application you must add more, probably 512 meg is really enough for most folks. There's some nice conveniences in WinXP but I feel that Win2000 is probably the nicest system (and probably the fastest) that I've used.
A video board of the 128 meg type usually adds to the performance and you will definitely see a difference over using the default video outlet that comes on most motherboards now, and faster of course compared to the usual 4 year old 32 meg board that lurks in many PCs.
I did mention the dual striped drive earlier but was warned about reliability as above. I made the dual drive comment because of a respected PC writer on a Sydney newspaper was working to build the ultimate office workhorse. Having a fancy motherboard and dual access memory sockets and appropriate fast CPU made the usual small speed changes, but the massive change in speed came with him setting up the dual system hard drive arrangement. He was bowled over by the way applications "snapped" open instead of the usual delays while they assemble themselves in memory. His conclusion was that dual SATA striped drives was the way to go to get the best bang for buck in speed.
(Touch wood) I've never had a hard drive fail and I've used many. What I do find though when I'm working on other peoples' PCs is that the hottest thing in the case is always the hard drive, even if the rest of the computer feels cool and the PC is in a cool room. Heat kills electronics and spreads grease around in mechanical things. So I always add a case fan or two to help pump fresh air into the case, then add extra fans inside the case just aimed at the hot devices like the hard drive(s) and the video board. About once a year at the latest I will open up the PC and get compressed air and blow the dust off everything (do it outside of course). You'd be surprised at how efficient a vacuum cleaner those PCs are, they sure collect a lot of dust. In fact if you open a PC after a year and it is clean inside then it's a sure sign that not enough air is being circulated inside the case. From 40 years of working on large room filling computers and now 15 years of PCs I can tell you that the main way to ensure reliability is to make sure all the cooling fans work.
With PCs if you spend x dollars you get a certain performance, double the dollars and you get maybe 25% performance improvement, quadruple the dollars and that maybe adds another 10% again. Mainly because the really top end parts cost a way lot more, out of all proportion to the performance gain they may add. And of course if the whole package is set up badly, you may never get the performance anyway.
Regards.............. Guy
