Not often I ask questions but.

Banny

Banny

Banny

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Have a spare rig that my missus uses, not too bad a spec really but my god it is slow, just want a few pointers to why as it is not bad spec really especially for what she plays.
Problems lies when you exit a game it take ages to get back to desktop, my netbook is faster.
Now I am wondering if it is HD releated or lack of memory

Specs are
[email protected] can go faster but not really as fast enough for her with lower volts.
Gigabyte DS3P 965 with DS4 heatsinks rev 3.3
2 gig of Corsair XMS6400
ATI3870x2
HD Western Digital WD2000JS 55NCB1 ATA device

So not really bad spec, ableit not in the same league as my main machine but still very capable none the less and I dont think it should be as slow as it is, its fine when running games but slow exiting them.

I do have a 250 gig WD2500KS in the drawer if it was the drive, if so is it easy enough to do a straight drive copy from one to another.
Thanks for any pointers dont want to chuck money at it for no reason as it is not my main rig just a spare.
Oh and it is not an old install of Vista neither and is all up to date, takes awhile to shut down aswell.
 
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Try sticking the Windows 7 RC on it and see how well it runs. Also the hard disk is probably a bit slow, being ATA. If you don't have a spare SATA drive lying around, it might be worth buying one. Also, more than 2GB memory might help with Vista as well.
 
just checked out the Hard Drive, looks to be a SATA-300. Can you confirm ATA/SATA?



EDIT 2: EDIT was pretty much said in above post anyway XD
 
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I always found the slow return to desktop was down to not enough memory. Playing old games (current at the time) on my P4 2.8GHz with 512MB of ram would cause the desktop to load down the screen really slowly,which was fixed when I upgraded to 1GB.

I had the same problem again when I started trying to play CNC3 when it first game out - 2GB upgrade fixed that (was using winXP).
 
normally its lack of RAM, if you were on xp then itd be fine, but being vista with 2gb isnt very nice. Although if you had a fast enough drive it would be as bad as it could just load it from its swap file.
 
Another thing to check is to make sure the cpu is running at the correct clock speed. Sometimes the bios will set the CPU multiplier to its lowest setting if there are any boot issues and this means a sluggish PC if this change is not noticed.
 
Thanks everyone, as for clockspeed that is fine pretty experienced overclocker so no worries there.
I reckon it might be down to memory but 2 gig is not a really low amount, can try taking my 4 gig out of mine, see if it helps.
 
One think I'm not sure has been mentioned - what res does she game at, and what res is the windows desktop at?

I find that my alt-tabbing or closing/opening of games is significantly faster when I'm playing at native. Anything else takes extra thinking about by the PC, so takes longer.
 
seeing as it's vista it could be complaining about only having 2gb and haveing to move stuff to and from the pagefile when transitioning from a game to the desktop
 
Also takes an age to load games, for example if I play Project reality takes ages to load the maps up, even lesser games are taking ages to load.
If it wasn't for the fact that Punkbuster dont work with Windows 7 it would have been on there ages ago.
Have to keep a Vista machine running just for Battlefield, dont want to dual boot on my main rig on the raid 0 array.
 
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