Fao: People whom know stuff about compooters

[axs]

p4 2.66ghz, 768mb ram

[Simon Pieman]

XP I take it?

More memory would make it quicker - depending how much it will take, a couple of sticks won't set you back too much cost wise.

If the hard drive is full then try and get rid of unwanted files - or burn to a disk. Uninstall the programs you don't use (old games etc). Then defrag the hard drive.

Also booting into safe mode and doing an anti virus and a spyware scan will help.

Unfortunately the processor is old but it should still be good for most things. Is there anythign in particular that's slow?

[axs]

there's no games on there, it runs xp, i defrag every couple of weeks, i run AV and spyware checks weekly, the HD is under half full (30GB capacity). I've stripped everything off it i can. it still won't play videos without jumping around or the sound getting out of sync with the video and it takes about 8 hours (no joke) to burn a DVD on nero.

[Barry Scott]

I kinda want mine in RAID 1 now, but for some amazingly daft reason I thought I'd try RAID 0 for a laugh (to see if it did boost performance) and never changed after that.

I suppose there isn't much on my computer at the moment and all of it could be moved to my external drive, so I should probably get round to doing it while I have the time off.

I want quicker RAM soon, that will give you better performance than the 44mb you lose from XP  

Still wouldn't stop me trying to prevent windows robbing me of my memory.

For my new pc i squeezed as much ram in as i could for 32bit XP. I actually overstepped the limit, but it means i can afford to give a load more to the soundcard, so windows shouldn't be too concerned.

I wanted raid 0 on my new pc, but decided i was being a twat, again, as the drives are quicker than anthing else i've ever had. I'd also heard of some raid 0 arrays breaking, so acted like an adult and just kept it all normal.

[sonic youth]

my laptop is painfully shit and slow - can you tell me what to do to make it quicker?

turn it off and turn it on again

[Simon Pieman]

Hmm, I'm not quite sure what you mean about giving the sound card more memory but I'll take your word for it

[Barry Scott]

Hmm, I'm not quite sure what you mean about giving the sound card more memory but I'll take your word for it

The system is built for music production and the sound card has it's own processor/s for use with effects, an on board synthesiser and a sampler.

Depending on the environment you're working in and the load on the cpu, ram and hardrives, you can choose to load more sound into the ram, as opposed for it to be read from the hardrive.

If for example you have a large number of audio files being read from the hard drive, it may start to crack or pop, because the hard drive has hit it's limit.

So what you can do is tell the sampler to either, read ahead further (load more into the ram, slightly increasing cpu load, and lowering HD load), or load some or all sounds entirely into the ram, increasing use of soundcard processor, but significantly lowering HD usage and giving you the quality back and a little room to play with elsewhere.

[Simon Pieman]

But do you ever run out of RAM?

[Barry Scott]

I used to, but then i've never had over 1GB or a sound card of this standard before, so every mb counted, hence my pathetic tendency to fight windows for every last scrap of free memory! Windows won't beat me this time.

[Barry Scott]

Just thought i'd post the next step in my Frank Spencer like computer escapades.

Today I spent about 4 hours installing software and plugins, then started finding some didn't work (i didn't check as i went!). Then I decided to up the sample rate on my soundcard and see what happened. The soundcard errored and then closed itself down followed closely by a lovely blue screen.

Now everytime i turn it on it insists it has no page file, yet i can clearly see it has, and everytime i shut it down it blue screens and its also hyper unstable. I'm such a cock don't you know.

Install 4 (less streamlined) here i come...