Do you ever feel your PC is slow?

hamster

This is not a virus question.

I have a PIII-850Mhz with WinXP pro for the last 5 years now. Time has crept up on it! I'm still happy with it but I am just curious how responsive the new shiny P4's out there are like.

I booted up Firefox 1.07 after a reboot after the PC's drive has finished initializing everything. It takes 12-15 secs. How long does this take you? This is not a competition... just curious how long people typical wait. It's certainly not instanteous. Word 2000 takes about 5 secs

Memory on board is 512Mb and a relatively slow defragged 5400rpm 80Gb Seagate. I guess after Service Pack 2 was installed I began to notice more. Last install was last year... Main background stuff would be Kerio's Firewall and AVG.

I haven't upgraded for awhile but looking at Civ4's positive reviews I could be forced to.

Laguna

Come on now, a P3 850mHz feels slow because it is slow. It's about three generations old now that dual core processors are becoming more commonplace. You're probably trying to run modern progams on it that simply need the extra oomph that 2gHz+ processors deliver. Time to upgrade my friend.

CyberGhost

P4 3.2GHz

3-5 seconds to run FX(and I have like 50 extensions installed)

WizZard

Firefox is a slow loading program in any case.
But a P3 850 is slow, however if you are happy enough with it then fair enough.

On my old system (*sob*) my Windows boot time was so short the little animated bar didn't have time to go across even once. :v:

hamster

Yeah I know a P3 is waaay behind now but I haven't played a heavy game for years... damn my IT job... time is the issue! :eek: But I think I'll pull out half life and finish off Opposing force first! Next year, I'm gonna, gonna...... upgrade! It's actually things like Celestia and Starry Night, Google Earth, World Wind ... and ah... Half Life 2 which I will eventually buy (and now civ4) that will get me moving....

Oh yeah and WinUAE 1.0 .... I like a lot of the old games but the Amiga ones really like a P4 to be perfect. Other than that it has aged well... probably after 2003 it felt like it was aging (mainly due to Geforce 2 I have) ie it didn't go obsolete overnight like that 486 I had for 2 years.

commited

A3400 - firefox takes about 2-3 seconds to open

peepsbates

Laguna wrote:

Come on now, a P3 850mHz feels slow because it is slow. It's about three generations old now that dual core processors are becoming more commonplace. You're probably trying to run modern progams on it that simply need the extra oomph that 2gHz+ processors deliver. Time to upgrade my friend.

couldnt agree more

Capt'n Midnight

Don't forget the registry keeps growing and you accumulate other .dll junk that only a clean install of windows in another folder or reformat would solve.

have a look at physical memory in use in taskmanager, then restart in safe mode and check again and compare to clean installs

you haven't put any sony cd's into it have you ? - permenant slowing of a P4 by a few % would mean a lot more on a PIII

Trampas

My 2pence worth in this

What do people need the new PC's for???

Do up a word doc?? No,

Create a websire?? No

Why do people need 2+ ghx proceeors and 80gig hd and 1 gig of ram for.

Can someone tell me that.

Joking aside and no stupid replies for but I think must people have this is so they can play games on it. MS word and the internet dont use up that must processing power.

Dinner

Trampas wrote:

Joking aside and no stupid replies for but I think must people have this is so they can play games on it. MS word and the internet dont use up that must processing power.

Gaming and video/audio editing would probably be the main reason for a beast of a comp. There are others I suppose too.

CuLT

Trampas wrote:

My 2pence worth in this

What do people need the new PC's for???

Do up a word doc?? No,

Create a websire?? No

Why do people need 2+ ghx proceeors and 80gig hd and 1 gig of ram for.

Can someone tell me that.

Joking aside and no stupid replies for but I think must people have this is so they can play games on it. MS word and the internet dont use up that must processing power.

Personally RAM is the big thing for me; I do a huge amount of multitasking, several web and graphic design suites running at once, firefox (which eats RAM) I do a fair amount of video encoding for my PSP.

I doubt the movies and music require a lot of processing power or memory, but you can certainly use a good bit of CPU power in postprocessing to clean up images as much as possible.

I have half a terabyte of hard disk space, and I could certainly use more, a gig of RAM which seems to do the trick (for now) and my processor is a fairly simple XP2500+

I don't play games; not even on the PSP (I wanted a good portable video player with the option of playing games if I was ever interested).

For the most part it's gamers that need the high spec machines. A/V editing etc will eat whatever new tech you throw at it too though.

pred racer

Trampas wrote:

My 2pence worth in this

What do people need the new PC's for???

Do up a word doc?? No,

Create a websire?? No

Why do people need 2+ ghx proceeors and 80gig hd and 1 gig of ram for.

Can someone tell me that.

Joking aside and no stupid replies for but I think must people have this is so they can play games on it. MS word and the internet dont use up that must processing power.

Games and video!

It is also quite alot like the car thing, for 99% of us an 88 fiesta would be pefectly functional for the driving we do and the spped limits we have, but how many of us have an 88 fiesta?

Wertz

Trampas wrote:

My 2pence worth in this

What do people need the new PC's for???

Do up a word doc?? No,

Create a websire?? No

Why do people need 2+ ghx proceeors and 80gig hd and 1 gig of ram for.

Can someone tell me that.

Joking aside and no stupid replies for but I think must people have this is so they can play games on it. MS word and the internet dont use up that must processing power.

More RAM for multitasking, especially with todays memory intensive applications (games aren't the only things that hog memory)
Faster CPU for faster encoding/transcoding with video/music, multitasking and just generally for getting applications to open and load that bit faster.
More HDD space for file storage...videos and music eat storage.

MS word? I can't recall the last time I used word or any thing else work like on this PC....modern PCs are a home entertainment hub. If I worked in an office/corpaorate environment I'm sure a bog standard PIII would do all I needed it to...fortunately I don't.

TerrorFirmer

An 800mhz pc is more then enough to run anything in the line of what you've mentioned.

I had a 400mhz pc recently that ran XP perfectly, as well as numerous programs, and games like Quake 3, Unrealy Tournament and Counter Strike perfectly on good settings.

Unless you do alot of media work or play new games, even a flippin Pentium 1 suffices for most standard clerical work and net browsing etc....

....its not that your pc is old, there's probably just something wrong with the components. 800mhz is fine....unless you are trying to run heavy multimedia programs on it.

But if not, I'd look into getting a new hard drive. 800mhz is more then enough to run tons of games that are still popular today on max settings as well as browse the net or do office tasks with no real difference to a better computer.