Re: Speed improvement?

In alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt Bob Fry <bobfry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ditto with what John Weiss says. You need to do some things before
upgrading your cpu:

"JW" == John Weiss <jrweiss98155nospamatnospamcomcastdotnospamnet> writes:

JW> "Frank McCoy" <mccoyf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
>> Compacting the data-base in Agent. (It's HUGE. about 22 gig
>> or so. Almost all straight text files.) I keep running into
>> the 4-gig limit for files. ;-{

JW> Get rid of your excess messages! How did you get 22 GB of
JW> messages?!?

>> Compacting my Eudora Database "In" file. (I've broken it down
>> into several parts already; and it's *still* enormous.)
>> Displaying large JPEG files.

JW> Save the JPEGs to a regular file folder and get rid of the
JW> messages they came in.

Not familiar with Eudora, but can't you save most messages to an
archive file, and only keep the last few months active?

>> Very little else I do is computation-bound. Windows' spooler
>> ties up the *entire* system' 100% CPU usage; but I don't think
>> that will be affected. (I can hope though.)

Nothing you've mentioned so far is computation-bound, it's all
disk-bound.

JW> It shouldn't do that. Maybe you have a problem with your
JW> printer driver. Have you looked for an update? Have you
JW> defragmented your HD lately? Have you purged your Temp files
JW> recently?

Run windows' disk cleanup (right click on a drive letter from Windows
Explorer, Properties, Disk Cleanup). What exactly is Windows'
spooler? The printer spooler? or its indexing? If the latter, turn
it off for all drives (it's broken, doesn't find everything) and use
Agent Ransack or Google Desktop.

>> One gig (2-500meg PC-3200 sticks). Windows XP home.

First hardware upgrade I would make would be to bump the memory to 2
GB, but don't do that yet. Defrag and clean up the disk drive(s)
first. Report back here and let us know how things are running.

Like I said, I *keep* the drives fairly clean.
I prefer Norton Utilities for that.
What comes with Windows takes almost twice as long to do the same jobs.

I killed indexing *years* ago. What a piece of crap.

The problem is with the SPOOLER. Not sure why yet.
I'm still researching the problem.
All I know *so far* is that CPU usage goes to 99% and 100% once the
printer-driver passes the data to the print-spooler. I'm going to try
various things to see which of three devices is the one taking up the
time. Still, that won't tell me *why* the system does that; as not one
of the three (printer, disk-drive, ethernet) should take up that much
CPU usage, even if saturated.

Yes, adding another gig would *maybe* speed things up.
But, it would cost a *lot* more; since I'd have to drop both 500mb DIMMs
and buy two new 1gig sets (or one 2gig DIMM; which is more expensive
yet).

I'm *not* really looking for "which upgrade is best" at all.
Just wondering if this particular upgrade will do anything at all for
me. I'm thinking it will, for a damned cheap price.

I just wonder how *much* of an improvement; or will it only appear in my
CPU-Z test without any apparent improvement in anything I do?

For *most* things I do, the system is about 1000 times or more faster
than what I need. But, if I can get a *cheap* upgrade (my budget, as
said before, is almost nonexistent) to improve some things, then why
not? Replacing memory or disk-drives at the moment is *not* an option.
Besides, none of the bottlenecks I've been able to identify seems to be
either one. I generally only run one major task at a time; and mostly
*that* is more bound by my fingers typing than the computer. A 2mhz
8080 and 640K of RAM would probably do fine for *most* of the stuff I
do. It's those exceptions where I run things like disk-copies overnight
and walk out of the room while Agent compacts its data-files, or I load
a *huge* picture from NASA, and it takes time to convert it from JPEG to
pixels on the screen, even when it's on a hard-drive.

Even there, I suspect most such jobs are more disk-bound than CPU bound.
A few years ago, that wasn't the truth. It might be now though. I need
something *fast* like a RAM drive to test the theory. Sadly, RAM drives
just aren't something that Windows likes very well. ;-{

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