why are the old Dell PCs at school faster than my custom rig?

[tjaisv]

Here's what i built a year ago:

Athlon 64 3400+ socket939
Abit AV8 (VIA K8T800 Pro chipset)
Geil 512MB PC3200 CAS3
GeForce 6600GT
Western Digital Raptor 36GB (system drive)
Western Digital 250GB Caviar
Windows XP Pro

As u can see my system is no slouch (of course it's no smoking demon either). Yet i'm wondering why the older Dell PCs at the local community college library seem to perform faster than what i have. By faster i mean more responsive and with quicker application load times. For example, when i open up Windows Explorer on their systems it's almost instantaneous, whereas on my computer there's a noticeable several millisecond delay. Another example is IE, which opens up insanely fast on their systems but relatively slower on mine (of course that may be more a result of their network). And their old MS Word 98 opens up way faster than my MS Word 2003.

Now I'm Not sure what their PCs have in them, but i wouldn't think they'd have anything unusually high-end or expensive; they're just library lab computers for the public to use for web/email/word. So why are they seemingly better than mine? I'm guessing they have faster RAM maybe? If i plopped in better RAM would that make my system load times applications faster? Or is it because their PCs aren't loaded with a bunch of apps/software and they get re-ghosted every night?

 

[AmberClad]

Only 512 MB of RAM? No wonder...

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: AmberClad
Only 512 MB of RAM? No wonder...

I don't think a school would equip their Dells with 1GB+ of RAM either. Although, getting a second 512MB stick to run the A64 in dual channel would probably make for a noticeable boost.



Althernatively, look at 1) Drivers installed are old, or installed incorrectly. Via chipsets have a tendency to be touchy. 2) A Heavily fragmented drive. 3) Something using the CPU/HDD, like a virus scanner.

 

[johnnqq]

more ram?

they most likely don't ahve as much software to load (nor viruses?)

 

[imported_Pablo]

I know wher eI went to school, every night, the computers ghosted a fresh install on every computer. That way, every morning, fresh computer!

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

Yet i'm wondering why the older Dell PCs at the local community college library seem to perform faster than what i have What OS are the PC's at your school running? I have noticed that my own older systems running Win2K seem to launch IE faster than my A64 3000+ system with WinXP. May have something to do with OS overhead?

 

[eXx08]

Because they are running on a network all PC's use the same system as all of them combined. At our school we have Pentium 4 1.4 GHz 128MB Ram and a GeForce Ti400 and these computers blow my dell 512MB RAM Pentium 4 2.66GHz 80GB HDD out of the water. Anyways they are all hooked up to each individual system and run as a network.

 

[tjaisv]

as for the RAM, yeah i'm thinking i should just get some 2x512GB CAS2 high performance stuff and see if that doesn't take my system up a notch or two in performance

Originally posted by: GonzoDaGr8
What OS are the PC's at your school running? I have noticed that my own older systems running Win2K seem to launch IE faster than my A64 3000+ system with WinXP. May have something to do with OS overhead?

I believe they're running WinXP too.

Originally posted by: thekillerjks
Because they are running on a network all PC's use the same system as all of them combined. At our school we have Pentium 4 1.4 GHz 128MB Ram and a GeForce Ti400 and these computers blow my dell 512MB RAM Pentium 4 2.66GHz 80GB HDD out of the water. Anyways they are all hooked up to each individual system and run as a network.

I'm not quite sure i understand what u mean here. How would the fact that they're on a network equate to better system performance on a per PC basis? Are they sharing collective RAM or something?

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

I'd say it's becuase they have less programs and drivers to load.

 

[tjaisv]

Originally posted by: t3h l337 n3wb
I'd say it's becuase they have less programs and drivers to load.

That's what i thought. But why would that have any effect on an application that u load long after the PC has finished booting?

 

[bob4432]

less programs and i am sure you are probably not the first person to use the machine that day. so when you start up a program it already has been started. for example, reboot your machine and start ie, it will take xx seconds, now shut down ie only then restart it and it will load faster.

couple this with not much software on the machines and probably just some flavor of av running and your machine will be just as fast.

thekillerjks - could you please explaing what you are trying to say???

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: thekillerjks
Because they are running on a network all PC's use the same system as all of them combined. At our school we have Pentium 4 1.4 GHz 128MB Ram and a GeForce Ti400 and these computers blow my dell 512MB RAM Pentium 4 2.66GHz 80GB HDD out of the water. Anyways they are all hooked up to each individual system and run as a network.

That makes absolutely no sense at all.

But to answer the OP: newer software generally contains more bloatware and runs slower than older software. Anti-virus (especially with On-Accss Scanning enabled) makes a huge difference in speed.

 

[CrispyFried]

Are the school P4s HTs? Those are fairly snappy at the desktop level. And its those little things that make a computer "feel" faster.

 

[anarchyreigns]

Originally posted by: tjaisv
why are the old Dell PCs at school faster than my custom

If that's the case, there is probably something wrong with your system.

 

[MBentz]

Originally posted by: thekillerjks
Because they are running on a network all PC's use the same system as all of them combined. At our school we have Pentium 4 1.4 GHz 128MB Ram and a GeForce Ti400 and these computers blow my dell 512MB RAM Pentium 4 2.66GHz 80GB HDD out of the water. Anyways they are all hooked up to each individual system and run as a network.

I think you need to step back and look at what you just said.

OP, I would have to say a combination of keeping their systems fresh with the ghosting and no useless apps on the computer are making it seem faster.

 

[ZippyDan]

spyware?

viruses?

incorrect bios settings?

faulty hardware?

k

 

[Poser]

I'd put money on it being what Bob4432 said. The library computers have the programs cached in RAM already because someone else was recently using the same program. Open IE, close it. Open it again. Compare the speed of the second opening to what you saw in the library.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Poser
I'd put money on it being what Bob4432 said. The library computers have the programs cached in RAM already because someone else was recently using the same program. Open IE, close it. Open it again. Compare the speed of the second opening to what you saw in the library.

thanks, do this with large program like photoshop and you will definately see a difference.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: MBentz

Originally posted by: thekillerjks
Because they are running on a network all PC's use the same system as all of them combined. At our school we have Pentium 4 1.4 GHz 128MB Ram and a GeForce Ti400 and these computers blow my dell 512MB RAM Pentium 4 2.66GHz 80GB HDD out of the water. Anyways they are all hooked up to each individual system and run as a network.

I think you need to step back and look at what you just said.

OP, I would have to say a combination of keeping their systems fresh with the ghosting and no useless apps on the computer are making it seem faster.

this is true, my wifes machine is a 1GHz Athlon and when doing day-to-day stuff, it is not much slower than mine because it is running win2kpro and has a rather trimmed down install. when it comes to gaming or encoding or doing anything cpu intensive, that is a different story. when i had a 10k rpm scsi hdd in hers, it was really nice.

 

[Some1ne]

1. Defrag your hard disk.

2. Run an adware/spyware/virus scanner, remove things as necessary.

3. Update your OS, and all of your drivers.

4. Clear out your startup folder, and also your HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run registry folder.

5. End-task anything that's left.

6. Set your IE homepage to blank, otherwise you're not comparing your system performance against theirs, your comparing network/Internet connections.

7. Compare again, and leave the Dell in the dust.

 

[yhelothar]

They're using an EXTREMELY cut down windows. Basically try running a neutered guest account on a fresh-install of windows and see how little resources it takes to run it.

 

[JEDIYoda]

Originally posted by: thekillerjks
Because they are running on a network all PC's use the same system as all of them combined. At our school we have Pentium 4 1.4 GHz 128MB Ram and a GeForce Ti400 and these computers blow my dell 512MB RAM Pentium 4 2.66GHz 80GB HDD out of the water. Anyways they are all hooked up to each individual system and run as a network.

the above statement makes no sense at all!
Also there is not 1 thread of truth in that statement!

 

[eXx08]

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda

Originally posted by: thekillerjks
Because they are running on a network all PC's use the same system as all of them combined. At our school we have Pentium 4 1.4 GHz 128MB Ram and a GeForce Ti400 and these computers blow my dell 512MB RAM Pentium 4 2.66GHz 80GB HDD out of the water. Anyways they are all hooked up to each individual system and run as a network.

the above statement makes no sense at all!
Also there is not 1 thread of truth in that statement!

OK sorry it made no sense, what I'm trying to get across is that at our school each computer in each class room is hooked up to every computer in the whole school which means it is networked like a supercomputer.

 

[Some1ne]

No, unless they are running some massive distributed parallel computing software, having a huge network of computers does not a supercomputer make. There's no coordination or sharing of resources, a network is just a network.

One thing that they may do however, is have a powerful centralized server, and then use the networked systems as "dumb" terminals that basically just interface with the one centralized good computer (or it could be a cluster of good computers) rather than running anything locally, but this is a fairly rare setup.

 

[eXx08]

Originally posted by: Some1ne
No, unless they are running some massive distributed parallel computing software, having a huge network of computers does not a supercomputer make. There's no coordination or sharing of resources, a network is just a network.

One thing that they may do however, is have a powerful centralized server, and then use the networked systems as "dumb" terminals that basically just interface with the one centralized good computer (or it could be a cluster of good computers) rather than running anything locally, but this is a fairly rare setup.

OK the second statement I think is true because we have a room in our school filled with servers and I think they are all hooked up to the computers.