Office PC

[trif]

We generally buy reconditioned PCs (pentium 4 - hyperthreading) and probably DDR 1 ram (1-2gb) - 40gb hard drive

they are only really running a lightweight MRP system and outlook 2007 + Excel + Word so I would have thought they would be fine but they're very slow across the board, sometimes even starting a new email takes 2-3 minutes,

I dont really get why this is, i mean the performance of DDR ram compared to DDR 3 can't be that huge for office style applications can it? and hard drives haven't got that much faster have they? or are those small things enough to make the kind of difference where everything goes from instant to sluggish?

anyway we have started buying new Vostro's from Dell

either:

E6500 core 2s or Core i5-750s,

i've not noticed much difference in performance for the extra £100 but they have not had time to suffer from the inevitable slow down that seems to effect every PC ever,

TLDR;

Is office 2007 really that demanding? why would the pentium 4 generation PCs struggle so badly?

Can you avoid PC slowdown in the realatively clean (installs wise) office environment?

Would LGA1156 make much difference over LGA775 in an office environment now and after a few years use?

Thanks,

 

[trif]

does it really need to be DDR2/DDR3? also i guess up to date hard drives do make a fair difference?

 

[trif]

The dell offerings seem to be LGA775 with DDR3, seems odd

Anyway will a basic E6xxx series core 2 be good in a year or two? or will it suffer from slowdown?

 

[Raidur]

PC slowdown should not be occuring in a clean office environment. And the cheapest new CPUs out today should be more than sufficient.

Keep the PCs clean and defraged with free Ccleaner and Auslogics Defrag.

Keep them protected with antivirus (avast/avira) and spyware (malwarebytes).

Do the PCs start out slow?

Delete the Dell added helper crapware.

Try using a more secure browser like firefox. If you HAVE to use internet explorer just make sure its fully updated.

Make sure you keep windows and office updated.

 

[trif]

All of the above are done, they start out fast, they slow down after a few months, i've even tried cleaning out msconfig of any 3rd party Dell etc crapware, i think big outlook mailboxes just kill them :/ i can't think what else it would be.

 

[damasvara]

All of the above are done, they start out fast, they slow down after a few months, i've even tried cleaning out msconfig of any 3rd party Dell etc crapware, i think big outlook mailboxes just kill them :/ i can't think what else it would be.

Virus does that to the system. By your statement " they start out fast", that means the above suggestions work. But somewhere along the way, they slowed down again. Correct?

If that's the case, there are a couple of possibilities:

1. Virus/malware infection, verify this possibility.
2. Fragmented HDD, defragment if necessary.
3. Junk files, broken registry and temporary files build up, use an AIO maintenance software like TuneUp Utilities and its kind to optimize the PC performance.

That's all I can think of. If you're only using light office work such as Excel, Word, or PP, just use Office 2003 Lite Version, although I'm not sure it's legal or not (I might get banned/reported for saying this ). Unless your work requires you to use the 2007 version, the Office 2003 is easier on the resources.