Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1

[Steve Burke]

Kiri, that's hugely helpful. Thanks very much indeed

 

I'll digest it all and ask another question or two after that, but that's given me a lot of the info I need.

[kirisute]

no worries...ask anything you need to

[Steve Burke]

Having had some time off due to surgery, I've been thinking about my productivity. The biggest bottleneck has been my computer getting slower and slower. In fact so slow just recently that I've had to restart it several times a day. This will of course much improve with a new machine, that really is overdue. This is the first chance I've had of addressing the problem.

 

At present I've been hibernating the computer each evening, and then waking it up each morning. When it starts to go slow I restart it. Is this a good idea or is it counterproductive?

 

If I had an SSD drive (hybrid or not), and shut the computer down each evening how much more quickly would it restart in the morning?

 

If this is much faster and also leads to less go slow problems, might not an SSD drive be a good option for me? I'd assumed so, but Kiri's remark about reliability worries me. Or would it not be a major problem because of our multiple back-ups, especially as we may be totally cloud-based before long?

 

 

[Steve Walker]

Solid state drives should be intrinsically more reliable than mechanical drives - I think Kiri's comment related to hybrid drives, which are presumably at best no more reliable than any other mechanical drive.

[kirisute]

Ok let's sort this: an SSD drive is basically a large USB pen drive....so it's uber fast because it has no moving parts etc and it's simply a big memory chip.

A standard HDD has a series of metal disks that are writen to....they spin like a stack of cd's. The faster they spin the faster data can be written and accessed so a 7200 rpm drive is fast etc

A hybrid has both: usually an 8 gig SSD memory chip and then a 500 gig standard drive. The SSD caches data in a similar way to RAM and as such feasibly produces faster data transfer and access speeds. However it's limited by the speed of the mechanical HDD section...and the technology is prone to failure on a few models I've tested.

In tests they produced maybe a 10% increase in boot time and read access of files. For me that's not worth the possible risk of failure.

In comparison I run a 250 gig SSD drive and windows 8 will boot from cold in less than 20 seconds! The limitation is that as with memory pens you have limited data read and writes but it's in the tens of thousands.

 

In a perfect world you would run an SSD. Drive for your operating system and programs and a standard HDD for storage. This gives super quick booting and data access to software whilst keeping large amounts of storage.

 

SB: in your case, hibernation , creates a system images of the current state of the operating system; taking up to maybe 4 or 5 gigs of space to create the image. In theory this image is quicker to load than starting a system from cold....but in practice it requires good amounts of RAM and a good CPU to access that data quickly enough to make recovering from hibernation significantly faster than a cold start.

Hibernation never really functioned as well as it should and with a modern SSD drive even an older system will boot shed loads faster from cold than from an old system in hibernation.

[Steve Burke]

Once again, Kiri, many thanks! It's much better getting info from here as there's no vested interests and sales talk.

 

Hibernating on my computer works very well and boot up time is a little over a minute compared with 3 to 4 times this for a restart. The latter I do about once a week. Part of my nightly maintenance is running CCleaner and this certainly seems to help. This is with a Core 2 Duo at 2.4Ghz, 4mb RAM and a 7200rpm hard drive. The latter has a capacity of 250GB but it's rarely more than half full. Recently though it's been getting clogged up, although a disk clean up soon gets this sorted.

 

I think in the longer term (once the machine is out of warranty) I'll get a full SSD as Kiri has suggested. My son fitted one to Peggy's machine, but unfortunately it went tits up very quickly. It was very fast though, and we were probably just unlucky.

 

Thanks again, Kiri!

[kirisute]

You shouldn't need to run ccleaner more than once a month or so.

Have you run malwarebytes at all? If not then I'd suggest you do.

I've forgotten: did you say it's running vista?

[Steve Burke]

Yes, I run Malwarebytes roughly weekly, plus AVG paid for is set to do a daily scan.

 

Currently I have Vista. I bought this machine about 4 years ago, just too early to get a free upgrade to Windows 7.

[kirisute]

vista will be your primary problem: would promise you with either a windows 7 or windows 8 install on there it would behave a lot better. it was OK for an OS but it was a HUGE system hog and prone to running slower and slower.

you will be shocked if you pick up a new system with 7 or 8 on it exactly what you've been putting up with...especially if you go full SSD.

[Steve Burke]

(Initially posted on wrong topic).

 

I've found something more flexible than the Dell on the Lenovo web site as you can have just about any configuration you want (including a 128mb SSD) on this business machine: http://shop.lenovo.c...ge-series/e540/

 

Any thoughts?

Edited January 12, 2014 by Steve Burke