andrewducker | My computer's too slow

The speed is fine... sometimes I could do with more RAM or more bandwidth.

What could I do?

Play Bejewelled Blitz without the machine freezing for up to seven seconds at a time.

Convert all my US TV AVIs to iPod and iPhone compatible MP4s for watching while travelling.

Create complex multi-part musical pieces with "live" effects on each track so they could all be tweaked/remixed later.

A lot of things don't *need* speed, they can just take two-to-ten times as long to complete ... but that really screws around with workflow because it means some things are too painful to do, other things aren't "instant" so you lose focus or momentum.

A lot of multi-tasking things (watching video while converting other videos, downloading multiple torrents, have gmail updating, virus checker updating, java updating etc.)

My main PC is seven years old now (2.4Ghz Pentium 4 with 1.5Gb of RDRAM) and even disk transfers are really going very very slowly now ... (yes, I've defragmented the disk, doesn't seem to have had much effect)

Nothing too esoteric, really, just games :-)

(Supreme Commander is mostly ok, but SupCom: Forged Alliance seems to be harder on it, I get pauses and slow-downs sometimes - still, not bad for a laptop)

My new computer is quite fast enough for me... then again, it's insanely overpowered even for my current needs (who *needs* to run Crysis at 60fps?) built when drunk on an unanticipated cash bonus and the possibilities afforded by the Core i7 CPU.

My previous six-year-old one, though, had become too slow for modern games and video/audio editing... and would've laboured mightily under Windows 7 had I upgraded the ancient thing.

-- Steve's now reminded that he hasn't installed CueBase on his new system yet. Ah, a project for the weekend...

lizzie_and_ari are right on the money. People in general don't have enough RAM, simply because of the way PCs are sold: on the headline figure of CPU speed, so it looks like a good deal to half the RAM but squeeze an extra couple of MHz into a machine for the same price.

I frequently refer to the HDD light on the front of PC cases as the "Buy More RAM" light. Because if it's blinking, chances are you need to buy more RAM.

Oh, I'd probably be satisfied if my desktop could solve the travelling salesman problem deterministically in O(log_n) time. Doesn't have to be fast, just has to be able to do it ...

i just finished upgrading my desktop yesterday, so i've yet to discover what it can't do.

so far, on some benchmarks it is 8x the speed of my old setup (athlon 64 3000 -> core i5 750), it doesn't stutter when playing high res bbc iplayer, and copying files across the gigabit network is twice the speed it used to be. which is nice.

I basically just need more RAM, but the warranty runs out on my laptop in a couple of months so I'm hesitant to spend money (even just £40) on RAM for a machine that will just need replaced if it breaks any time after December.

So what would you be able to do on your computer if it was faster that you can't now?

Play Crysis at 1600x1200 with 16xAA & AF above 60fps, damn things struggles to go above 20 at the moment - clearly that's just ruining my life right?!

Mostly it's a case of doing the same things, faster. What's got me puzzled is that right now it's seriously unresponsive in a lot of text areas in Firefox - but not all. This one's fine, but usually on facebook and often in Gmail, I need to wait about half a second for each letter to appear (so if I want to type a string of 120 characters or so, I then need to occupy myself for a minute while I wait for them).

Otherwise it's mostly fine! Suspecting there's some kind of simple fix that I'm missing, but buggered if I know what.

My laptop is perfectly fine for running applications but a slow for running any games that have come out in the last couple fo years.

It's the 256Mb VRAM that lets me down. Everything else is more or less great. If I had a better card, I'd play DOOM3 at max settings, I'd play Crysis, Fallout 3, GTA:IV, possibly subscribe to Aion.

Since it's quite possible the most intensive thing I actually ask my Lappi to do is play Peggle, or similar type games, I don't think I'm actually taxing it to it's potential I admit...

it's lack of disk space that is killing mine I think. Running Thunderbird seems to do horrible things to performance for some reason....

Run more VMs - Two copies of ESX, a vCenter server, a DC, a Labmanager server, some guests... *dribble*

My sole machine is a single-core 2GHz laptop with 1.5GB system RAM (upgraded from 512MB about a year ago) and 64MB of video memory. It's lasted me over four years, which is impressive, although the only original part remaining is the bottom of the case.

The only things that bother me performance-wise are editing HD video, processing large numbers of raw DSLR photos, and running anything particularly graphical in a VM.

But then, I don't play games - or haven't since Portal, at least, which ran fine.

I've looked at replacements, but it looks like all I'd really gain is an extra core, which for much of what I'm doing might not really help much.

My slightly ancient, but sadly missed dead ibook was just about fine for what I wanted to do. I am hugely, madly grateful to have a borrowed machine to work on, but it *churns* and wheezes when I'm working on big images. Press button and make strong cup of tea time.

I have a new laptop with 4 GB RAM but it still took about 45 minutes to render my video into a DVD image... or one of the steps of creating the DVD, anyway. The video editing itself didn't pose any problems.

If it wasn't in the last category, then I'd be upgrading it as a priority.

I suspect for everyone it's the OS and apps that are slow, not the computer.

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