I have an intel duocore duo cpu e8200 @ 2.66 ghz, and 2 gigs of ram on windows vista 64 bit. I do lots of photoshop, have tons of firefox instances, ftp, etc. open at all times. I also think I may ahve my data split over 2 hard drives - each have 140 gigs, but only have about 13 gigs free each. What would be my best course of action to make things faster?
The biggest boost you’ll probably get from more RAM, like 2 gig more so you have 4 gig total. What would also help is a Solid State Disk (SSD) hard drive, those are very fast and speed up the system considerably. Of course you have to install windows and your programs on that disk instead of the disk it’s on now.
would it be worthwhile to get 4 more gigs of ram?
I don’t know. I have 4 myself and completely happy with that. For reference, I have a ~3Ghz dual core, 4GB DDR3 and an SSD and Photoshop (CS3) starts in like 2 seconds.
I just ordered 4 … it something like $39 shipped or $69 shipped. In the grand scheme of things, I think a possibility to make it faster for $30 more is money well spent. Thanks for your help!
The biggest slow down you have currently are your hard drives, they are way to full by the sound of it, and will seriously affect your performance if that is the case, so getting say a 1TB drive and storing files to that will be the most noticeable difference currently, but adding extra ram will certainly help as well (as said above), but without the drive(s) being sorted you will still be running slow.
An SSD is most certainly the biggest speed boost to a system currently (again as said above), I tend to go for small(er) OS drives, and 1TB or 2TB drives for storage, the theory is recovery is much faster if\when the OS drive needs formating or infected etc, as thats the drive most likely to need attention before the others, but multiple back up sources are good practise if you can’t afford to lose any files, but most recommend drives to be about 60% ish full, 75% tops, because it needs the extra space to move files etc while your accessing them, and defragging, without that space it really slows a system up, hope this helps a bit.