Comments on: Intel unveils new class of Pentium 4s

The new processors have a lot more cache. They also include notebook technology designed to cut power consumption.

[Stating]

It's New. It's Improved. Whiter Whites. Brighter Brites.

The personal computer industry has had one and only one mantra. Faster CPU speed. Having exhausted that, they are now fixating on a larger CPU cache until Microsoft ships XP 64, at which time the new mantra becomes 64 bit processing.

So, you go out and buy an $800+ computer, maybe add some extra RAM like the sales person tells you, take it home, plug it in, expect blazing fast performance, but it seems kind of slow. And the hard drive just keeps grinding away like crazy.
Do you know that for less money you can boost your overall computer performance by 50-100% or more? How?

1) Pay attention to the disk I/O subsystem
2) Tune the XP operating system to make intelligent use of system resources
3) Do basic system maintenance regularly

I recently bought a Compaq Presario on sale for under $400. It ran OK out of the box, but was not what I would call fast. The first thing I did was replace the slow 7500 RPM IDE drive with a 15,000 RPM SCSI and Adaptec controller card. That boosted the overal performance of the computer tremendously. Next, I added an extra 512 meg of RAM (on sale at Fry's). But even after adding additional RAM the computer still seemed a little sluggish. And annoyingly, it kept accessing the hard drive for no apparent reason. So I looked under the hood using Windows Task Manager, to see what was going on. A couple of processes, like explorer.exe were page faulting like crazy. I knew that with 768 meg of RAM and no applications running there shouldn't be any page faulting at all. What to do?

I did some XP tech research and found a couple of registry keys that override the default paging behavior. I adjusted the keys to reduce faulting to disk, and use some of that 3/4 gig of RAM I have. Wow, what a difference! Page faulting was reduced tremendously, XP hardly hits the hard drive unless I am running an application program, and everything is speedy like it should be.

The system mods I made to my middle-of-the-road Compaq brought it up to a "gamer level" PC. Should I have had to do this myself? No. The computer manufacturers -- Compaq, HP, Dell, take your pick, should have spent an extra $150 to put in faster disk drives and tweaked XP to optimize resources. Instead, they just sell you on a faster CPU. But that only goes so far.

What are your options to get more bang for your computer buck? Relatively few. 1) Spend a lot of money on a high-end gamer computer that has at least a 10,000 RPM drive. 2) Hire a technology consultant to advise you and help you purchase a new computer and maybe do some big payoff hardware upgrades. 3) Read, study, and try to do it yourself. Good luck!

Keith
www.techcando.com

[aabcdefghij987654321]

Aaaaaargh !! What registry values?

I've seen Explorer pounding the disk like crazy for minutes at a time and wondered what it thought it was doing. What registry keys/values/tweaks did you find to fix that irritating and useless behaviour?

(Oh yeah, while the vendors could have made those tweaks why doesn't MS make them in the first place?).

[Johnny Mnemonic]

64 bit computing?

"The personal computer industry has had one and only one mantra. Faster CPU speed. Having exhausted that, they are now fixating on a larger CPU cache until Microsoft ships XP 64, at which time the new mantra becomes 64 bit processing."

I've been using a 64 bit version of Linux for the
last two years on an AMD processor. I am now
waiting for 128 bit! 64 bit is old news.

[wazzledoozle]

Not good for gaming?

With windows not dumping the kernel into a page file on the hard drive, and keeping it in in the system ram, whouldnt it slow down the performance of ram instensive applicatins such as games and multimedia?