How can I make my WinXP Pro PC run faster? (Second HD? SCSI? Dual-Core?) - Budget: aprox. GBP300

Jerry Stuckle wrote:
ship wrote:

Hi

I need some advice - how can I make my PC go faster!

snip

Load Linux.

Just how will that make DreamWeaver go faster, Jerry? Hmm?

hdrdtd wrote:
I agree that SCSI drives can be quite a bit 'faster', but they do cost more
than your typical ATA or SATA drives, plus you have to factor in the cost of
a good SCSI controller.

At work, we do physical testing of automobiles and automobile parts, and we
take extensive digital photos of the parts as they are being tested.

for some time now, the main PC we use for Digital photo procesing was a
custome PC built using dual P3 550Mhz CPU's 1gig of ram, and several SCSI
HD's running mainly Adobe Photoshop 6.0 and processing 16meg TIF files.

We decided it was time to build a newer PC, and to that end we built a PC
using a single 3.2Ghz P4, 2gig of ram, a 36gig raptor to boot to and a
320gig WD drive for storage.

Our photographer tried the new system for a couple of weeks, then proceeded
to revert back to the older system with dual 550Mhz CPU's and the SCSI
drives.

Was that "Dual Pentium" or "Dual CORE Pentium"?

It sounds like disk speed was by far the most important thing
for you photographer - and that SCSI was significantly faster the WD
drive
(whatever "WD" is!).

So this sounds like I'm being steared towards some sort of SCSI...
- but at what *price*?!

I am told by my hardware supplier that a "decent" SCSI controller is
about GBP 250 or so(!) ...And he doesnt recommend anything less...
Whereas my entire budget is about GBP 300, maybe GBP350 absolute
tops...!

Also could anyone possibly explain what RAID1 RAID0 are?
Are they remotely within my budget?

I had a look at www.adaptec.com - who used to be one of the
top names in SCSI, but I don't know where to start.
I mean which of the following would be *remotely* relevant?:

- Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
- Ultra320 SCSI PCI-X HBAs
- Ultra320 SCSI PCI RAID
- Ultra160 SCSI PCI HBAs
- SCSI PCI HBAs
- SCSI JBOD
- iSCSI HBAs


Ship
Shiperton Henethe














"Mike Walsh" wrote in message
...

SCSI drives have very good performance. When I bought two 160 GB 7200 RPM
IDE drives for my home PC I had planned to retire my old SCSI drives but
decided to keep my 10,000 RPM 9 GB drive for page file and temp files when
I found that the random access read rate (reading 64 KB data blocks) is
20% faster than the IDE drives.
The fastest drives available are 15,000 RPM SCSI drives in RAID 1, but
higher density IDE drives have excellent sequential read rates (good for
reading very large files). You can get good performance without RAID if
you use separate drives for OS, data, page file, and depending on the
application, temp files.

ship wrote:

Hi

I need some advice - how can I make my PC go faster!

e.g. How much faster is a SCSI hard disk compared to a SATA?

MAIN APPLICATIONS I USE:
DreamWeaver 8 (huge websites),
Outlook2003 (1+GB .PST files etc)
O/S: WindowsXP Pro (SP2),

MY EXISTING COMPUTER:

Processor: 3.2Hz Intel Pentium 4 -
RAM: 2GB
Disk: Seagate 120Gb 7200rpm SATA

PROCESSOR: Intel Pentium 4 based system
MOTHERBOARD: Intel Pentium 4 D945GNTLR system board
Integrated Intel GMA950 graphics
*Intel High definition audio
*Intel 10/100 LAN*8USB 2.0
*4 conventional PCI *2 PCI Express x1 *1 PCI
Express x16 *1 Serial*1 Parallel
*4 Serial ATA interfaces
*1 Parallel ATA IDE interface with UDMA33,
ATA-66/100
*PS/2 Keyboard port *Mouse port
*Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz Processor 775 chipset 800FSB
2Mb cache
RAM: 2Gb 533 DDR2 memory
GRAPHICS CARD: Matrox Millenium P650 PCle 128 - 128Mb Dual DVI/VGA PCI
Express X16 - s/n: KEW37452
CASE: ATX Midi tower with 300W 12V PSU
DISK: Seagate 120Gb 7200rpm SATA hard drive
OPTICAL: DVD RW dual layer +&- drive
FLOPPY: 1.44mb 3.5" Floppy disk drive
O/S: Microsoft Windows XP Pro Oem

Main applications: WindowsXP Pro (SP2), DreamWeaver 8, Outlook2003

I WAS thinking of replacing the processor with a DUAL-CORE chip.
But I have been largely talked out of it.
Looking the WindowsXP "Task Manager" Performance monitor
it seems that for most of the time the processor is barely being
used - it's mainly DISK ACCESS that is so slow.

The WORST applications for slowing up my PC seem to be
Outlook2003 and Dreamweaver. (I have already done what
I can to shrink the files that they are using...)

SCSI?
Should I change or add another hard disk?
If so how much faster would a SCSI hard disk be?
My hardware supplier says that a "decent" SCSI controller
would set me back about GBP 250 - just for the controller!
But how much faster is a SCSI hard disk compared to a SATA?

Or maybe I should simply buy another SATA hard disk and put
all my data (e.g. .PST file[s] and large websites etc) on it..
Maybe I could get a SATA disk with a huge amount of CACHE??

I have a budget of about GBP250 to 350.

- Any suggestions? And any idea how much FASTER each of
the options would be likely to make things run in practice overall...?

- Any thoughts?

Ship
Shiperton Henethe

--
Mike Walsh
West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A.

Fleeing from the madness of the http://groups.google.com jungle
ship stumbled into
news:microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware,alt.http://www.webmaster,alt.comp.hardwa... pc-homebuilt
and said:

...
and that SCSI was significantly faster the WD
drive
(whatever "WD" is!).

Western Digital?


...
Also could anyone possibly explain what RAID1 RAID0 are?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redunda...ependent_disks

--
William Tasso

http://williamtasso.com/words/what-is-usenet.asp

300 pounds sterling would buy you alot of downers and muscle relaxers.
Take plenty of those; as long as they hold out, your computer will SEEM
alot faster! Of course, I think you'd be best off spending the money
on a Core 2 Duo E6600 ($185 American). Your motherboard is already
Core 2 Duo ready, so you can keep that and your 2 gigs of RAM (which is
plenty). Let's see, that leaves you with, what's the conversion
between USD and GBP? Uh, I'm gonna guess like 100 GBP left over to put
back into your account towards a brand new quad-core rig sometime next
year (or more/better memory for the computer you own).

wrote:
300 pounds sterling would buy you alot of downers and muscle relaxers.
Take plenty of those; as long as they hold out, your computer will SEEM
alot faster! Of course, I think you'd be best off spending the money
on a Core 2 Duo E6600 ($185 American). Your motherboard is already
Core 2 Duo ready, so you can keep that and your 2 gigs of RAM (which is
plenty). Let's see, that leaves you with, what's the conversion
between USD and GBP? Uh, I'm gonna guess like 100 GBP left over to put
back into your account towards a brand new quad-core rig sometime next
year (or more/better memory for the computer you own).


Nice thinking - except that as far as downloading emails into Outlook
goes,
it now seem that my hard disk is being thrashed to death, whilst my
CPU more or less has as snooze. Hence adding another "core" to the
processory chip seems unlikely to help...

....unless you know otherwise by experience!


Ship
Shiperton Henethe

wrote:
300 pounds sterling would buy you alot of downers and muscle relaxers.
Take plenty of those; as long as they hold out, your computer will SEEM
alot faster! Of course, I think you'd be best off spending the money
on a Core 2 Duo E6600 ($185 American). Your motherboard is already
Core 2 Duo ready, so you can keep that and your 2 gigs of RAM (which is
plenty). Let's see, that leaves you with, what's the conversion
between USD and GBP? Uh, I'm gonna guess like 100 GBP left over to put
back into your account towards a brand new quad-core rig sometime next
year (or more/better memory for the computer you own).


Nice thinking - except that as far as downloading emails into Outlook
goes,
it now seem that my hard disk is being thrashed to death, whilst my
CPU more or less has as snooze. Hence adding another "core" to the
processory chip seems unlikely to help...

....unless you know otherwise by experience!


Ship
Shiperton Henethe

SpaceGirl wrote:
Jerry Stuckle wrote:

ship wrote:

Hi

I need some advice - how can I make my PC go faster!


snip

Load Linux.


Just how will that make DreamWeaver go faster, Jerry? Hmm?


Not necessarily Dreamweaver - but there are a lot of Linux based tools
out there, also. And most of them are free, and many are better quality
than Dreamweaver.

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.

==================

On Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:38:08 -0400, Jerry Stuckle
wrote:

Hi

I need some advice - how can I make my PC go faster!

Max out the RAM and delete any processes that aren't needed. Too many programs
load up helper processes that suck up RAM.

Move your pagefile to another hard drive

An edit to my last post:

Where I said:

Generally Speed Up NTFS (NOT COMPATIBLE WITH WIN9x/DOS Software)

Corrected: not compatible with DOS software anything that runs using
Long FileNames under Win9x will be fine under winXP with these
enabled

Here's a few tweaks for you to increase your system speed Under WinXP
Home/Pro



Disable Paging Executive Files (Registry)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session
Manager\Memory Management
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001

Enable Large System Cache (Registry)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session
Manager\Memory Management
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001

Disable NTFS Last-Access TimeStamp (Registry)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\FileSystem
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001

Generally Speed Up NTFS (NOT COMPATIBLE WITH WIN9x/DOS Software)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\FileSystem
"Win31FileSystem"=dword:00000000
"Win95TruncatedExtensions"=dword:00000001

Enable 48-Bit LBA for drives (Registry)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atap i\Parameters\
"EnableBigLba"=dword:00000001

Disable NETBIOS_Netcrawling (Registry)
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Explorer\Advanced
"NoNetCrawling"=dword:00000001

Disable User Tracking (Registry)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\policies\explorer
"NoInstrumentation"=dword:00000001
"NoRemoteRecursiveEvents"=dword:00000001

General FileBrowsing Speed-Up (Registry)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\stisvc
"Start"=dword:00000002

Uninstall unneccessary software
Set your PF to (0.5 * RAM)
Put PF on SATA/SCSI Disk
Turn off unneccessary services (Messenger, NLA, Processor Serial,
stuff like that) (MMC---Services)
Disable S.M.A.R.T for IDE disks until you need it (BIOS)
Disable Peer Concurrency (BIOS)


Well I hope some of this helps...Leep me posted on what u decide to do