The secret overclock

Devrij

Devrij

Devrij

Soldato
Joined
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This is less exciting than it sounds, and for that I'm sorry.

Basically, my work desktop is rubbish. I'm talking 30s superpi rubbish (yeah I ran it just for lolz). My manager says that if I donate the parts, I can modify it (eg add to the 2GB RAM etc). I'm considering taking him up on it, among other things.

The question I have is this, would a Core2 6300 @ 1.87GHz even benefit from extra RAM? How much of a bottleneck is it? Should I clone the HDD and put something faster in (I'm not sure I'd be allowed, but you never know)?

I'm going to get into the BIOS and see if I can overclock it too, if it'll let me. :D

I'm sick of typing something, waiting, and then seeing the text type itself into my browser. It's just obscene.

Any other ideas for speeding it up that don't require admin privileges are welcome (page file?).
 
Why will they not pay for new hardware / upgrades if its so slow doing anything. Do they not realise that £100 spent = x% increase in your performance?

Or will it just enable you to browse unrelated work sites faster!
 
Showboat said:
Why will they not pay for new hardware / upgrades if its so slow doing anything. Do they not realise that £100 spent = x% increase in your performance?

Or will it just enable you to browse unrelated work sites faster!
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Sounds like a business case for an IT refresh to me, £250-300 per desktop would give you useable work machines.
 
Yeah right. I wish they would. They have our admin team running VMs on the same machines. My manager complained that it takes 10 mins to load up his VM and they added 512MB to his PC. No, I have to do it myself.

BIOS is woefully basic, so I think it'll just be a RAM upgrade. Even an extra GB would probably do the trick, and I suspect I'll find 2 populated DIMM slots so that means 2GB of DDR2. Part of me wants to pick up a little 60GB SSD as well though.
 
are they stand alones or are they actually RDS or Citrix based ..... in which case no PC upgrade will really help you as they have linux installed normally and are "dumb" all your windows and appilcations are sent and completed on the server side.
 
Ethermaster said:
are they stand alones or are they actually RDS or Citrix based ..... in which case no PC upgrade will really help you as they have linux installed normally and are "dumb" all your windows and appilcations are sent and completed on the server side.
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They're W7 standalone machines
 
that really is poor, if it's so bad you are willing to spend your own money to upgrade your work computer!! Don't forget that one day your computer might disappear and your employer may not make much effect to get back your own parts (and that's assuming you don't have to prove they are yours to start with).
Still, I admire your commitment to the job!

Aside from an SSD and memory upgrade, the only other thing I could think of is to have a look at what is running and use msconfig (or other software) to prevent anything unnecessary running to converse memory and CPU usage.
 
Different to what I was expectating, doing a major upgrade on the ram and using some as a ramdisk could be an option and using that as cache or storage for important programs. If you can install programs that is, I know ramdisk from superspeed/raxco allows you to use unallocated ram.
I guess it depends on your restrictions as to how viable it is.
 
VMs should be hosted on a dedicated server, not client machines that would have been an ok desktop a few years ago.

Is it for coding?

If it was me I'd put a case forward that your productivity is being crippled by the lack of decent hardware.
 
pandem0nium said:
VMs should be hosted on a dedicated server, not client machines that would have been an ok desktop a few years ago.

Is it for coding?

If it was me I'd put a case forward that your productivity is being crippled by the lack of decent hardware.
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Oh we have. The VMs are to run ancient software that runs in DOS, to give you an idea how committed our company is to upgrading its hardware and software.

Oddly enough I'm on a 64bit OS, so I could go quite high in terms of RAM capacity, and 4GB of DDR2 isn't that dear if it means my job (which is all through a browser-based CRM) is less of a PITA. I think I'll have to forgo the SSD after asking whether I'd be allowed to mess about with the HDD and being told no.

Sadly I have no admin permissions so I can only run software from USB or that doesn't require installation. Can't even increase my pagefile :( :mad:
 
Get a better job.

Okay, it's not that easy - but if my boss won't give you the tools you need for your job, you're going to have a hard time doing the things needed to distinguish yourself for promotion etc. I'd also point blank refuse to improve my work PC with my own money unless it was for playing games in my lunch hour... your boss should be spending £400 on a nice shiny new PC each, you shouldn't be shelling out £150 to improve a crap desktop to usable.

He pays you how much a year? I don't know, but 12,000 per person even if you're all on minimum wage (actual cost to the company is more like £13,000 by the time you include NI contributions, insurance etc, not even including running costs for the office etc). It's also not including the fact that you're worth more to the company than your own salary.

Even if you only lose 15 minutes a day because your machine is slow (2 minutes on startup, a minute opening each big document, and constant slow work) then a £400 desktop will pay for itself within a year, and end up with a £1200 profit over a 4 year lifetime.

If you're paid more than minimum wage, lose more than 15 minutes a day, or if you factor in other office running costs for that wasted time, it'd make it back even faster. Try working out how much time you waste because of your PC, and work it out as a proportion of your time. If you want my sums, (hours per day * 60)*(£400/£salary) gives the number of minutes per day you'd need to save for the PC to make it's money back in a year.

Then go with that number to your boss, along with an estimate of how much time you waste. If you work at a chargeable rate to clients, include that too to show how much profit he's losing. At that point, it's his business choice...
 
Just buy a cheap laptop and get the IT to load your Windows User Profile onto it and get the IT dept do "there stuff"..... then leave it in the office? if you leave the company just reformat it and use it as a normal one.
 
Considering we each earn around 27k, and whether we can accept incoming business or not often comes down to whether you have time to process a booking before deadline, I think it'd be very worthwhile for the company to even invest 20 quid in each pc for some extra RAM. Unfortunately, these decisions get made down in London, so our cries have gone unheard.

There's always an argument against it, so I figured some old cheap RAM would make my life easier quicker than sending loads more emails. It's a new office so my guess is they only bought these PCs recently and thought they got a bargain, so that may explain why they don't want to consider upgrades.
 
yeah its a sad point that everyone cuts back IT because most finance directors say "is the computer working?" yep .... then it will OK until it needs replacement". Its sad most don't realize a small outlay on upgrading the IT gear could actually save them more monies and in most cases make them more.... but meh :(

What you could do is with the people in your team make a strong business case to upgrades and now that would improve performance and benefit the company then submit it to the CEO, Finance Directors and if you have one the "the board", whats the worst they can say other then no?
 
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To the OP. You mentioned you were running Windows 7, I would use a readyboost USB stick to help improve speeds. They do work and will help the machine if short of memory, make sure you choose one of the faster sticks, Patriot ones are good.
 
JasonM said:
To the OP. You mentioned you were running Windows 7, I would use a readyboost USB stick to help improve speeds. They do work and will help the machine if short of memory, make sure you choose one of the faster sticks, Patriot ones are good.
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Ooh that's a good idea. I'll do that.

E: I know it should take a while to build up the cache, but it seems to have made a massive difference almost straight away. Win!
 
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Devrij said:
Ooh that's a good idea. I'll do that.

E: I know it should take a while to build up the cache, but it seems to have made a massive difference almost straight away. Win!
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If you use 2 memory sticks it will span the data read/write over both sticks, improving performance. You can use multiple sticks but after 2 my experience any performance gains you won't notice.

You need a memory stick with fast read, the write performance of the stick does not really matter. Some of the fastest sticks are the USB 3 ones, they tend to still be faster even if used in USB 2.
 
Hate people who are like this... It's one of the things I liked so much in my year placement at Jaguar LandRover. My boss actually understood how useful an efficient PC was, so we all had desktops/laptops (with docking stations) no more than 2/3 years old, and everyone in the team had dual screens :)
 
JasonM said:
If you use 2 memory sticks it will span the data read/write over both sticks, improving performance. You can use multiple sticks but after 2 my experience any performance gains you won't notice.

You need a memory stick with fast read, the write performance of the stick does not really matter. Some of the fastest sticks are the USB 3 ones, they tend to still be faster even if used in USB 2.
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Good point. I'm not sure how readyboost distributes the cache, so I'm not sure if it'll have the same striped raid array effect, but it's certainly worth a go. I'm only using an old SanDisk 8GB (of which 4gb is dedicated to readyboost) so in theory there are more gains to be had. I've noticed that switching between tabs and alternating between chrome/excel/word no longer lags for crazy amounts of time, so I'm pretty happy with that already.

Thanks chaps!
 
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