Athlon XP 3200 / Intel i7 comparison

[kevvyb]

Hi

Am just getting around to tackling this having upgraded my old machine from an Athlon XP 3200 (2.2GHz) and an Intel i7 2.66GHz overclocked to 3.2GHz.

There is no doubting that this processor runs stuff like Photoshop CS2 and Lightroom etc much faster, just how they should be. My old Athlon used to struggle.

 

However, with everyday computing tasks there can be noticable lag. Examples are opening an excel spreadsheet, opening Outlook, add/remove programs population, applying changes to display settings etc. All usually just okay but not quite as instant as my old Athlon. There can be processing delays with basic tasks that just were not present with the Athlon. Task manager never really shows much activity. In fact I have never seen any core above 17% with the i7. These issues are always worse at start up when I can see disk activity but I am not sure what is going on.

 

I have been experimenting with Windows Desktop search which was certainly implicated. I have uninstalled this. I have also changed the settings on my backup application (Mirror folder) so that it does not run whilst the machine is starting up. These have definitely improved the situation but I still don't see much if nay improvement with these basic tasks.

 

Maybe I am just running into a hard disk bottleneck....?

 

Can anyone shed any light for me on what I am seeing?

 

Rest of the set up is as follows:

Case: Coolermaster Cosmos S

PSU: Corsair HX1000w

Mobo: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5R

Processor: Intel i7 2.66GHz o/c 3.6GHz

Cooling: Zalman CNPS 9700 LED

RAM: 3GB Corsair PC10600 1333Mhz DDR3

Hard Drives: Samsung F1 1TB x2

Graphics: 1GB nVidia GTX 280

Sound Card: Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1

Optical: LG / Pioneer 116

Monitor: NEC 2470WNX

Operating System: XP Home and Pro

[Plastic Nev]

Hi Kev, and welcome to free PC Help.

It does indeed look like a hard drive issue, my first thought is to run a defrag first then see how you go from there.

 

Next maybe to download C.Cleaner and run it in clean mode only, Do not run the reg cleaner part of it.

 

Nev.

[kevvyb]

Athlon XP 3200 / Intel i7 comparison

 

Hi Nev

 

Have already defragged. I have never really found defragging to make that much difference on ntfs file ssytems.

 

Maybe will try CC cleaner as well.

 

Thanks for your reply.

 

Will post back if using CC cleaner makes any difference.

[Plastic Nev]

Just be sure to leave the registry cleaner part of CCleaner alone, deleting registry files without full knowledge of them can be disastrous.

Nev.