New PC question... what's fast these days?

[Coytee]

My pc at work is getting long in the tooth. I think it's six years old. Memory tells me it's a 1.5 ghz, don't recall how much ram.

I'm about ready to chunk it into my shredder and obtain a new one. I'm not against buying a new one nor am I against BUILDING a new one. I've built a couple but havn't paid much attention to this stuff for several years.

So, should I just go to (brand X) and buy their speed demon? or should I build it?

I'd say my pricepoint is about $3,500 for BOX alone (I already have a NICE Apple 23" cinema monitor)

Networked office, just simple file sharing, no server. Are "SATA" drives still the rage?

Is a RAID setup fastest? (I think that's what it was called, with like 3 drives and all the data is spread 1/3 on each one so each drive can be ready to provide?)

My first goal is speed

My second goal, is speed

I'm SICKKKKKKKKKKk and tired of clicking on an application and having to wait 30 seconds for it to FINALLY become available to me.

Now, in defence to my current pc at work, it would probably not be a bad idea to simply reformat it and reinstall everything (ie, SOMETHING is wrong to cause my latency issues above)

I just want to use this as an excuse to finally ratchet upward

[]

Any suggestions from you PC savy guys?

[8-)]

[oldbuckster]

My daughter and Son in Law just bought me a DELL.....Dimension C521......this is a fine piece of equipment.................I am basically an in the dark guy that does not embrace modern things very well....but this is pretty nice............not real good with it, but I will be, sooner or later, I am hooked up to AOL Broadband, and it is pretty fast...............I see DELL's everywhere I go, must be something to them..................I am a computer NOVICE, just telling you what I know about this unit................Many out there better qualified to answer.........................Remember, I don't understand how a camera works without film....How you can play CD's without a cartridge.................

[Bill H.]

Coytee,

I am in the same boat as you!........for the money your talking about spending, you could get a Fabulous system. I also like Dell, because of their service, and response with my daughters computer.

Just remember, that in January the new operating system, Vista comes out- so you need to make sure that what ever system you buy is Vista compatable, and has lots of expandability! (Vista is supposed to need lots more Memory!- no suprise their!)

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2047287,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03129TX1K0000625

This is an article from PC Mag on what you need to build your own Vista ready computer, for about 1,600 bucks! Let me know what you end up doing.

[Duke Spinner]

Vista ...??

why buy into the latest crap from Microsux ..??

there are other fine O/S....

[Bill H.]

Duke,

I totally agree with you, that their are many other fine OS. However,

MS has over an 85% Hold over all other systems out on the Market today

and sadly most everyone uses MS............cause they are the Game that works!

[thepathlesstaken]

Do you use your machine for gaming, rendering, photo editing, or massive multitasking operation that would need lots of CPU cycles or memory?

If you are just doing normal MS office apps, outlook and a few other programs my suggestion is to check your hard drive RPM and PATA interface speeds. Hard drive speeds are the most limiting factor as far as precieved computing speed for your average user.

If you have 7200 RPM drives ATA 66-100 speeds then upgrading to a RAID, SATA, or even SCSI won't net you that much as far as speed increase for cash outlay.

I've done installs of Win XP lite on a pentium 200-500 mhz machines with 128 megs of ram and it is fine for running 2-3 general appications (outlook, word, browser) at the same time.

Next biggest peformance increase would come from a fresh OS install.

[thepathlesstaken]

For around $600.00 you can build yourself a brand new awesome close to top of the line system these days.

$400.00 would net you something very good in the used market.

My suggestions:

939 Athlon 64 @ or around 2 Ghz

Reputable mobo manufacturer (Abit, Asus, DFI, EpoX)

1 Gig o Ram

80-300 gig HD

Lite-on or NEC 3550 DvD drive

Fotron or Sparkle power supply - buy good PSUs

[Jay481985]

for non gamers and such the 500 dollar dells are fine

[Coytee]

1. Not a gamer

2. Office machine (Word/Excel/Klipsch [:$] )

3. I might have 1 app open, I might have 12 things open, though I tend to have no more than maybe 4/5 at single time

4. Current slowness is from startup on. Even at my desktop on initial startup, I STILL have probably another 60 seconds to just sit there before I can start anything.

5. Time delay... many times (but not always) I'll click on something and it won't "click" until I HOLD it for say 2 seconds. Since I"m a pretty fast typer and move around, I end up clicking again, trying something else... all the while, getting further & further behind the pc. I try to just SIT and wait for it to catch up with me.

6. No known viruses as of couple months ago

7. I keep it defragged/cleaned up

8. Better to use MS defrag or Norton's speedisk?

9. I know formatting will help, but I'm HOPING it's simply time to replace [A]

[Jay481985]

get a 600 dollar dell or so... get a better soundcard on the dell. Maybe a bigger hard drive to hold mp3 if you are into it. etc

[thepathlesstaken]

4. Old OS install with lots of stuff in your systray is my guess. How many icons do you have running to the left of the clock? Do you have antivirus running in the background?

5. Could be quite a few issues, hard to nail it down but my guess is something is writing to your hard drive when this happens.

8. Msofts defrag is Nortons old tech (they bought it from them). No idea which is better...

9. Backup to optical, partition the new drive so that C: is reasonably small (6-10 gigs for XP) so just your OS will be installed on it, reformat (it is probably way overdue), reinstall and never install anything on the C drive if you can help it. Reformatting and backing up is much easier when you have the OS install and anything else on seperate partitions.

Do the backup in 10-30 minute increments a day and you wont get burnt out doing it all at once.

All of the Windows operating systems tend to bog down after years of use. Only option that I have used to avoid this is to use Linux instead of M$.

[chevellerh]

I would definitely recommend building your own computer. It can be done for MUCH less that 3500$, at least 2500$ could go to more audio equipment[].

I would recommend: (prices are just rough estimates)

Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) ($200)

at least 2 gb of DDR2 RAM (fairly inexpensive at this point) ($200)

again a reputable motherboard ( PCI express compatiable IMO) ($100)

decent graphics card (x1600pro, 6600gt, etc.) ($100)

and raid 0 (twice the speed), 2 new Perpendicular 250 gb drives ($160)

That would be a great system for a long while if taken care of, most of the time systems get conjested with all the random crap out there even if they are taken care of, I do what thepathlesstaken recommends where 10-20 GB is used for simply the OS and all your documents are on a seperate partition, so i can reload whenever without taking a long time to do so, a fresh OS is always very nice. However if you just want to improve performance of your current system i

recommend running "msconfig" and going to startup tap and unchecking

some things you know you dont want starting immediately, bc these take

RAM and take forever to load on startup.

[DrWho]

The CPU really isn't really the bottleneck on computers anymore...what you want to do is maximize the FSB and RAM. If you want XP to run smoothly I would recommend a minimum of 2GB RAM. After that, you'll need to up the speed of the harddrive.

What AntiVirus program are you using? And how much "auto update" crap do you have implemented? At startup is when all the programs look for updates, and your antivirus programs initialize and hog resources. There's not much you can do except for turning it all off...

A few other considerations...

Even though you're doing normal stuff with your computer, I would recommend going with a dedicated sound card and graphics card...and hey, why not be crazy and go with a physics card too? [] The advantage here is that you move processing off the main CPU and free it up to do more useful things.

[thepathlesstaken]

Eghad 2 gigs of ram? Heck no, unless you plan on running high end games, video / music recording / editing, or heavy duty photoshop use there is absolutely no reason to get 2 gigs.

Dual core? Please people don't buy in to this marketing trickery. Your average computer user does not need that much computing power.

If you computer was working for you just fine and dandy the first few years (and your application use has not changed) then stick with the old machine as it is still viable.

[Jay481985]

althought ram is cheaper, I believe 512 is a good general start. I still have on my machine only 256 megs of ram but it is of the rdram or rambus that has 16 pipelines but was to expensive for intel to promote.

[Coytee]

Several thoughts:

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Not much is in my systray. I have EVERYTHING disabled in my startup (sysedit).

Im kind of stuck in some regards (MS, IE) because some of our service providers support XP and as best I know, not much else.

I dont have any auto updates turned on, none.

Hmmdedicated cards I DO have a dedicated video card but Im not sure about the audio. Now, a physics card???

I DO have two physical hard drives, maybe Ill look into reformatting this week, I just hate to do that again. Takes my entire day down.

[Marvel]

Something is going on with your system that isn't right. The computer I use at home the most is a dual Celeron, 466 Mhz, with only 384 meg of ram. Word is up ready to go in 8 seconds. I have had this computer for six years, and it has never been redone. It is still running Win2K though.

The Intel Dual Cores are great, and far more efficient than the regular PIV CPUs. They certainly aren't marketing hype. Expect even greater things fro Intel in the coming year, as they come on strong to whup up on AMD. The competition is always good for the consumer. A friend of mine works there and can only tell me that they have some great products in the pipeline.

Dr. WHo is correct about the FSB needing to be higher. Memory is cheap and 2 Gig of ram can always be used.

Drive I/O is a bottleneck. You could go with the 10k/15k rpm scsi drives. They will get your data to and from the drive about as quickly as anything out there. Our sys admin has his desktop set up this way now and it is a screamer. The main box is still a Dell Dimension 4500, with a 2.4 Ghz CPU.

[dewam]

In the past we have bought from Dell Refurbished. If you watch what they have for sale, you will notice a group of machines that are configured the same will come up. Sometimes only five, sometimes 20-30. These are machines that were returned from a corporation due to having the wrong specs. New machines at a refurbished price. It helps to watch the listings and know when a set of machines with the specs you are needing become available. You can set search parameters so you get your 2Gig of ram, good video card, processors of your choice. Den