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Slow PC - What is the bottleneck

Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 11:16 pm
by Benjamin
My girlfriends computer is slow. I'm curious as to what the bottleneck is.

You can view the specs here for the motherboard...

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/gene ... e=bph07845

This is what I attempted to do in order to increase the speed. Having done all this, I'm now curious to know where the bottleneck is.

Replaced the hard drive with a new Seagate 500gb
Replaced the Celeron processor with a Pentium 4.
Replaced the ram with 2 1gb sticks. (Motherboard only claims to support 1gb but it's all detected)
Added an old PCI Nvidia GeForce 64mb Video card.

Both Linux and Windows run slow on this thing. I'm thinking it's the FSB speed or something, it claims it's 400Mhz, but I swear I have seen similar computers run a lot faster. Using the computer in general is what is slow. There is always a lot of lag switching between applications windows. I'm used to everything coming up instantly when I click on it in the taskbar. Eclipse takes forever to start. It's mainly switching between tasks which is slow.

I've been out of the hardware game for a while, mainly focusing on programming. So maybe some of you can shed some insight on this.

Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 11:46 pm
by themurph
Does the system run stable?

What RPM is the hard drive? 5400 or 7200? 5400 rpm drives can be slooooow. SATA or IDE? If it is a SATA 3.0, make sure your motherboard supports it. If not, you may have to jumper it to run slower (which actually will improve system stability and performance considerably).

If the hard drive appears to be the bottleneck (light constanly on, drive constantly churning), you might try getting a 2nd drive and running raid 0.. or using a utility like spinrite (not free, but pretty cheap) to fully test the drive.

Are you sure you are running the latest hardware drivers, especially for the mobo? Is the BIOS flashed to a version that fully supports the new CPU?

When was the last time you put a fresh format and install of win/lin on it? Got WinXP SP2 with all the patches and updates?

Do you run anti-spyware and update/immunize/scan regularly?

Registry cleaners like ccleaner can help with system performance, especially if you install/uninstall stuff alot.

Do you defragment the hard drive regularly?

You can try defraging the windows pagefile to eek out some performance too:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint ... efrag.mspx

Also try testing your memory for problems:
memtest works well: http://www.memtest.org/

Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 11:52 pm
by Benjamin
Stable - Yes it will run for weeks.
Drive - It hardly ever touches the disk. It never even uses the swap file. Everything is in ram.
Latest Bios - No, but I'm not sure that would have an affect on speed.
Fresh Format - Both Windows and Linux were just installed 3 weeks ago. All updates installed with a few minor exceptions.
Registry - Clean - no worries there.
Spyware - No worries there.
Defrag - I haven't used windows enough to fragment the disk, and in Linux I don't need to defrag. But it's not nailing the disk anyway.
Memory Problems - Are you talking about bad ram? That would cause the system to be unstable I would think.

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 12:14 am
by themurph
I'd try checking out the release notes for the later BIOS versions. There could be some CPU, memory, or bus issues that were resolved or something.

I would think bad RAM would cause instability as well, but it couldn't hurt to test it just to be sure.

Try setting the bios to "performance" or "optimized" defaults, if it is an option. Also make sure all the bios settings related to the memory and video card are set up properly.. I've had issues with "Auto" ram settings on older mobos like that one. Set the timings, etc. manually to match the RAM specs and see if that makes any difference.

That's all I can really think of :?

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 12:21 am
by Benjamin
Ok, thank you for the advice. I'll check those things out and post back results.

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 8:56 am
by nickvd
What kind/size of power supply is in the system?

I've seen far too many "home upgraders" upgrade everything inside their cases to the nth degree, yet they're still running everything on the same old stock 300w psu. Unfortunately, far too many people under-value the importance of a quality high powered power supply. It is seriously, and literally (in that electricity is the blood) the life-blood of the system.

Bad blood/circulation: feeling sick, unwell, prone to infection

Bad power: Random lockups, weird errors, catastrophic hardware failure

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 10:11 am
by Benjamin
Honestly it's the same little old power supply that came with the thing. It hasn't created any issues though. I just threw a bunch of spare parts in it to help out my girlfriend. It would be a lot easier just to get a new motherboard for it than muck with tweaking it.

I think the bus between the CPU and the Northbridge, the bus between the CPU and Southbridge, or possibly both is the main culprit. There is no reason for this thing to be so slow.

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 10:52 am
by nickvd
astions wrote:I think the bus between the CPU and the Northbridge, the bus between the CPU and Southbridge, or possibly both is the main culprit. There is no reason for this thing to be so slow.

If it's the same motherboard, then yah, I would suspect that before the psu as well... Take a look at the motherboard but pay close attention to the capacitors... A couple years ago there was a HUUGE batch of bad caps that were used in countless electronic components (tv's, dvd's, mobo's, etc). We see at least one system per week with blown caps on it. The system will likely still work, but will run exactly how you're describing (albeit with plenty of crashes).

If you notice any that are bulging at the top (the small metal bit at the top) or if you see any crusty brown residue (DONT TOUCH!) then you have bad capacitors. Replacing the board is all you can do..