C2D system 'sluggish' and 'jittery'

[bigh]

I've had my homebuilt system for a year now and thought it was fats until I got a new PC at work which on paper should be slower but in reality it feels much more responsive. My home system is: E6600 @ stock, 2gb 667, 250gb samsung hd, BFG 8800GTS OC. My work system is an old pentium 4 with 2gb RAM.

It's hard to describe, but the symptoms are occasional delays when I click on something (e.g. start menu or a word file) and it seems much slower to open photoshop and outlook (although in reality there is only a small difference).

Any ideas what could be going on? I have defragged but it doesn't seem to help.

 

[ejay]

What OS is being used on each machine? This could make a difference. Also, and I have an E6600 (Vista) in one box and a P4 3.2 in another (XP Pro), and to be honest, I can't see much of a difference between the two in surfing the web or opening Word documents either. The tasks you mention, clicking on the start menu, opening a Word document, and "opening" Photoshop and Outlook, are more heavily influenced by memory speed, front side bus speeds, networking speeds, and/or hard drive speeds. You will see a difference in doing multiple tasks and more complex software operations, particularly in Premiere or video rendering tasks and some 3D operations (all other things being equal).

 

[Grimmy]

Might want to show us a CPU-Z link, for all of us to see what settings are for your system. Also perhaps your temps for idle and loads.

Other things to look at, perhaps running MSConfig to see what your startup programs are. Maybe perhaps running spybot, spyblaster, to see if you have any kind of malware going on.

Another thought, getting the brand software (like from seagate or western digital) that test your hard drive, just to be sure it's reading/writing correctly.

 

[bigh]

Thanks for the tips. Both Os are XP Pro and I have checked msconfig although I have not checked for malware.

Our network speeds are work are v.fast and I have a pretty rubbish broadband connection so maybe it's that. Games are good on my home machine.

I will definitely look at a hard disk tester. Does anyone else have a delay when they click on start?

 

[nukemaster]

please list you full specs

MB
CPU(its listed...but you get the point)
RAM(who made it)
Sound Card
Video Card
HDD(how made it)
ect

Some software is NOT dual core friendly and will slow the computer down...but photoshop IS dual core friendly and should be fast(well as fast as your hard drive will let it be)

Also does the P4 system have HT(Hyper Threading)?

 

[MadHacker]

the slow down you mentioned happens to me sometimes when one application takes all the ram needed then the OS just flushes cached data or swaps out what it doesn't need.

the slow down when u click on your start menu for example, will only happen once when you click on it... and as long as you don't run something that eats up ram... the start menu should be quick on successive calls?

 

[bigh]

Madhacker - yes that describes the start menu problem well, when i exit a program the system seems to take a few seconds to recover and is quick on successive calls.

My full systems is:
Gigabyte P965- DS4 mobo
E6600 @ stock
2gb corsair 667 4-4-4-12
BFG 8800 gts OC
Antec P180

The PC at work is a P4 with hyperthreading - it just feels that bit smoother and quicker with non-game apps e.g. word, photoshop etc.
Samsung spinpoint 250gb

I realise that i use my home PC in a very different way but i still would have thought it would feel much better than the work PC.

One thing I am thinking is that my work PC has virtually nothing on the HD as everything is held on the network - could this speed things up?

 

[bigh]

Oh my temps - well at idle it is a bit high - 37 -40 (using speedstep to measure) depending on ambient but never goes above 50 under gaming load.

 

[Grimmy]

Hmmm.. is the page file set for a specific size, or is windows resizing it?

Defrag would help lil on read times to load it into memory.

Sometimes you may have a program trying to access something on the home network which would cause delays on programs, for example, programs check for updates before executing.

Temps seem okay, especially if your room temp is about 80F, since your is actually reflecting what I have on a tuniq HS. If my room temps are near 70F, then it would hit around 28-31C.

So, I'm guessing something is getting the CPU resource and holding it to cause a delay. Just have to mess around with it perhaps to find out exactly what.