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| Thread ID: 24734 | 2002-09-17 10:26:00 | Hardware Upgrade Advice | flying_green_leprachaun (1767) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 80396 | 2002-09-17 10:26:00 | I was looking at my setup & I thought to myself... this is no longer that great... I am running... Win XP Pro on Intel PIII 1000 640mb PC2100 DDR SDram EPoX EP3VA 370/DDR/6 PCI/1 AGP GeForce 2 MX 32mb Seagate 30Gb ATA/100 Seagate 80Gb IV Barracuda SB Live 5.1 Fujitsu 12x10x32 IDE CD-RW some bogstandard 50x CD-ROM Any advice on how to improve performance? I think I am set space wise, but with 2 HD's & 2 CD's I think the PC is getting bogged down, IE when I try to open My Music folder there is between a 4 & 7 second delay before it opens (admittedly it is full, 15.8Gb full… could that be the cause?) casual query aside… What I am after is the “professional opinion of all the people here on how next to crank up performance, I would probably be willing to fork out $500-600 in one sitting if there would be a noticeable difference, but I am looking more around $300-400 really So Ideas please? My first thought is the graphics card... |
flying_green_leprachaun (1767) | ||
| 80397 | 2002-09-17 11:13:00 | Looking at your specs, you should not be having a performance problem. My guess is that the problem is with Windows. It might be time for a clean our, or reformat/reinstall if that hasn't been done in a lonh while. G P |
Graham Petrie (449) | ||
| 80398 | 2002-09-17 11:20:00 | last reformat was 1 month ago, did a chkdisk & defrag while I was at work today . . . there is no real performance "problem" but my ego is tied to my machines power ;-) I don't have a car so hey allow me my idiosyncrasies ;-) |
flying_green_leprachaun (1767) | ||
| 80399 | 2002-09-17 11:27:00 | Well the obvious would be upgrade the m/b and pop in a new 2GB or thereabouts cpu - P4 etc - but... your slow access time when opening My Music... is that while you have a disc in either of the drives? Coz WinDose in my experience always accesses the cd drives whenever it wants to, which always delays things. | Greg S (201) | ||
| 80400 | 2002-09-17 11:34:00 | under any and all circumstances "my music" will take at least 4 seconds to open... its been kind of an annoyance, I have relocated the my music to d: which is the 80 gigger make a difference? used tweak ui to do it |
flying_green_leprachaun (1767) | ||
| 80401 | 2002-09-17 11:39:00 | Flying Greenie... How come you needed to use TweakUI to change your default music folder? I simply deleted mine and created a new one on my D via Windows Explorer. Cheerz |
Greg S (201) | ||
| 80402 | 2002-09-17 11:52:00 | used tweakUI so that the start menu would point to the right place, I also moved my docs to the other drive, there is probably near 50 gb in the my docs folder . . . (I need to delete some of those CD images) if you simply delete & create a new one, does XP know what you've done?? coz that would be amazing really |
flying_green_leprachaun (1767) | ||
| 80403 | 2002-09-17 11:55:00 | Well, only do graphics card if you are a gamer... if not, then I fail to see why you would need anything more than that. 2nd thing would be to consider moving your hard drives to some "RAID" type set up... don't know much about it myself, but it is supposed to be HEAPS faster... would be cheap too... a raid card costs about $80-$90 I guess? 3rd thing... well, a DVD rom would be nice! As would a faster burner... if you're into that SVCD's and stuff, why not get a faster burner with an ASUS 16X DVD? That would be around $300 - $350 in total? Your P3 1Ghz should be able to handle that... Just my thoughts anyway... failing that, do a basic mobo and cpu upgrade... slightly more expensive, but you'd get that performance kick you're interested in... Lo. |
Lohsing (219) | ||
| 80404 | 2002-09-17 12:00:00 | I do wear my gamer hat ;-) I have found americas army to be a fascinating game. I Was considering a DVD rom too, but I think I will hold off on that till DVD burners are a little more competitively priced. (desktop theater neato ;-)) RAID? Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives... don't they need to be set up as 1 partition? I beg complete ignorance in this matter & will cease talking till more research done |
flying_green_leprachaun (1767) | ||
| 80405 | 2002-09-17 12:13:00 | There you go then... obvious answer would be to upgrade your graphics card first! I would prob say that anything over a Geforce 3 Ti500 would be over-kill for your system... that card would complement your system nicely, and isn't out of date yet either! DVD rom... well, I convert mine to SVCD format to watch in stand-alone players... quality is best you can get short of full on DVD... converts DVD format down to an mpeg2 format... burnable using a normal cd-writer! So there you go.. you can still use it! RAID... well, I will plead ignorance on that matter too... I just know it's fast! :p Go the new graphics card!! :D Lo. |
Lohsing (219) | ||
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