Hi there,
I thought I'd ask for a second opinion on my current PC. Recently it's been acting a little slow in more places than it used to do. It's an Intel Atom 230 @ 1.6Ghz so I'm not expecting HD performance but even day to day office tasks (which I bought it for) are slowing the machine down to crawl. I've notcied it most when the hard drive is going (try copying 2.2Gb of music from one folder to another and it almost crashed on me!) It's running Windows 7 32 bit (and ran the RC fine).
I know the hard drive is very slow - it's a 4,200 RPM Fujitsu drive that gives the following graph in HDTune.
I've been told that very slow, even for a 4,200 drive and could be a sign it's on it's way out and dying (though I've no indication of such in any tests I can see or in the SMART data). However I ran perfmon earlier in the following scenarios and it doesn't appear the drive is a bottlebneck...
Idle - Everything left as idle as possible
Running Syncback to copy new files to USB drive
Opening Chrome, HSBC website, GNUCash
I'm after some advice to the following:-
Is the CPU throttling my performance? I was deliberately after a low power draw machine as I only browse the web, watch BBC iPlayer, watch DVD's and office tasks (of which the hardest is probably using the GIMP to touch up photos occasionally or run LaTex to "compile" tex documents)
Is my hard drive the bottleneck? Or is it on the way out? I'd happily buy a new hard drive if it would make the PC more responsive especially if it alleviated some of my issues. However I have no wish to buy a new drive if it'll make no difference what so ever
Any advice is most welcome
I thought I'd ask for a second opinion on my current PC. Recently it's been acting a little slow in more places than it used to do. It's an Intel Atom 230 @ 1.6Ghz so I'm not expecting HD performance but even day to day office tasks (which I bought it for) are slowing the machine down to crawl. I've notcied it most when the hard drive is going (try copying 2.2Gb of music from one folder to another and it almost crashed on me!) It's running Windows 7 32 bit (and ran the RC fine).
I know the hard drive is very slow - it's a 4,200 RPM Fujitsu drive that gives the following graph in HDTune.
I've been told that very slow, even for a 4,200 drive and could be a sign it's on it's way out and dying (though I've no indication of such in any tests I can see or in the SMART data). However I ran perfmon earlier in the following scenarios and it doesn't appear the drive is a bottlebneck...
Idle - Everything left as idle as possible
Running Syncback to copy new files to USB drive
Opening Chrome, HSBC website, GNUCash
I'm after some advice to the following:-
Is the CPU throttling my performance? I was deliberately after a low power draw machine as I only browse the web, watch BBC iPlayer, watch DVD's and office tasks (of which the hardest is probably using the GIMP to touch up photos occasionally or run LaTex to "compile" tex documents)
Is my hard drive the bottleneck? Or is it on the way out? I'd happily buy a new hard drive if it would make the PC more responsive especially if it alleviated some of my issues. However I have no wish to buy a new drive if it'll make no difference what so ever
Any advice is most welcome