By tweaks, I mean disabling bloatware, unnecessary processes, services, features. Not overclocking (in case that's what you meant). Nothing dodgy or silly.

Here's an example (my Vista laptop with 2GB RAM)

Before (931MB - 59 processes)

After (634MB - 40 processes)


Boot times down, waiting down. HDD thrashing down. Pretty speedy for vista on a lappy. When I had XP, it used around 250MB iirc. 1GB of RAM should easily cope with XP (if optimsed).

Edited by camieabz (Fri 02-Sep-11 20:51:51)

Open up task manager and watch the performance of the CPU when switching between tasks. Also monitor HDD activity.

Just being on uses a constant 390MB (running on XP)

Opening IE with Yahoo as my home page jumps to 480MB constant but the CPU spikes at 97% for a second or two.

Every action (search, back button etc.) jumps CPU to 50%.

Google maps running at 500MB. Clicking zoom button on map image jumps CPU to 65%.

Dragging task manager window about, 32% lol!

Does this sound slow? The laptop I looked at was an AMD Phenom quad core. I guessed this would allow for four processes at the same time, and that as long as these processes weren't CPU heavy then the whole thing would run much faster. The sales muppwit confirmed this for me. But is that correct or is he using the old sales trick of agreeing with me?
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In reply to a post by mr_bean:

...(XP can't really use more than 3GB so there's no point going point having more...

My XP Pro system reports 3.5Gb of RAM, though I'm not sure whether it actually uses all of it

In reply to a post by mr_bean:

The NHS seems to have bucket-loads of Dells with Prescott processors (usually 2.8Ghz) - they're all s--l--o--w

Why does this not surprise me.

No doubt 80% of their IT budget is actually going to the profits of the company who they (no doubt) outsourced it too.

A bit of a "Cliche" you could say but you can't really measure acceptable performance/spec by watching CPU usage go up and down in task manager unless you really have a feel for it. Dragging a window about will certainly raise CPU up, infact, just moving your mouse around rapidly will no doubt increase CPU utilization in task manager by 2-3% on a P4 system.

I have a feeling you don't have a proper graphics driver installed. Can you double check this?

Failing this, it might be worth a reinstall of the OS (or further diagnostic) because from your descriptions it is underperforming. Double check Paging file settings are automatic, purge system restore, run chkdsk, defrag disks, disable indexing service, ensure all drivers correctly installed.

edit - copy and paste of the � didn't work first time round, cba learning the unicode.
edit again - oh, it did work, just this forum can't handle it before a quotation mark!

Edited by Pipexer (Fri 02-Sep-11 21:21:04)

Been looking at a HP laptop with an AMD phenom quad core processor (don't remember the exact spec off the top of my head) with 4GB RAM. Does it sound like this would be enough to speed things up for what I am using it for?

Just want it to flick between without a 5 second delay every time.

Sorry guys, I think I must have been a bit ambiguous with my post!
Though I will try all these things with my old PC, I was hoping someone could tell me whether or not this AMD spec machine would multi task for me?
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That should be plenty suitable. All this said I installed Windows 7 on a Pentium 4 Prescott 3.0Ghz with 1GB RAM and onboard graphics a few weeks back and it ran Aero and MS Word 2007 and IE instance perfectly, a bog standard office PC with value components, even Aero flip was smooth. Most of the time systems start going slow because they are bogged down with security products and other rubbish accumilated over the years.

My XP Pro system reports 3.5Gb of RAM, though I'm not sure whether it actually uses all of it

It depends on how much of the top 1G of address space is used by the system (e.g. for the video card RAM). the absolute limit for 32-bit XP is 4G - see this knowledge base article for the details.

Individual processes can only get a maximum of 3GB (and then only with special tweaking otherwise its 2GB).

However you only need enough RAM to hold running programs and their data - beyond that the OS might cache some disk pages and that might make things slightly faster but once you have "enough" RAM improvements from adding more diminish rapidly.

Thus with a maximum limit of 4GB, and a practical limit somewhere between 3-4GB I'd generally suggest 3GB max for 32-bit windows (of pretty much any flavour more recent than NT 4).

When upgrading, however you tend to be faced with limits imposed by DIMM size and the number of free slots and the fact that "dual channel" memory controllers need the DIMMs to all be the same size for maximum speed. So usually it winds up being either 2GB or 4GB - given that choice I'd probably go for 2GB in the system the OP describes.

For general surfing, word processing etc 2GB really ought to be enough. 1GB - depends on workload but RAM is cheap at the moment so it can't hurt to put an extra Gig in.

Sorry guys, I think I must have been a bit ambiguous with my post!
Though I will try all these things with my old PC, I was hoping someone could tell me whether or not this AMD spec machine would multi task for me?

Ah, well suggesting ways to pep up and old machine is "interesting" whereas looking a something modern which won't be tweaked much is less so

Would help if you could list the exact model. AMD processors are noticeably slower than Intel processors at the moment but it does depend on exactly what you're looking at and what budget you've got.

Thanks for the link. Some very familiar stuff from a virtual memory operating system I was involved in in the early 1970s.

I wasn't aware that an individual process was limited to 2Gb - though it makes some sort of sense to allow the OS itself to get on with its work.