Upgrade advice...sluggish performance

It's subjective though - but I'd still hang fire on a mobo swap and try the RAM and Win7 x64 first.

Me too. The CPU and mobo are perfectly sound. A Q6600 even at stock is a powerful CPU, and there's nothing wrong with the P35 chipset. The problems really sound like a lack of RAM.
 
Looking at the CPU-Z screenprints above it looks like it's running dual channel already at 3GB, and with Win7 out late Oct, should I just not wait.

Someone else suggested to me that I spend £250 on a 32GB SSD Intel X25-E Extreme 32GB 2.5" SATA-II, for the operating systems and software I use most, leaving the rest to the standard drive.

Thoughts?
 
No, complete waste of money given the rest of your set up. CPUz is lying, it cant be running dual channel as 3 isnt divisble by 2, to run dual channel you have to use paired DIMMs, last I checked they dont do 1.5gig sticks
 
I personally don't see the use for SSD yet. It's been commented before and although I would like to use them to replace everything I use, I can't justify the price yet.

30GB for the price of 2TB isn't good value no matter how much quicker it is. for that price there's over things you could upgrade to make it faster. That plus with SATA III I'd want to see how they'd work then.
 
you could do that. I don't like mixing numbers up but if you're keeping a 32bit os then yeah, it's workable.

have you got any way to free up some of your HD for a bit to partition and try the 64bit win 7?

That way you shouldn't have to play around with odd numbers of ram
 
Whoa, chaos. More ram is probably the answer, but the red flag for me is

44GB Free (456GB Total)

I'm yet to see windows running nicely when it only has 10% of the hard drive left. Any chance you can delete 150gb or so of stuff you don't need? I know you've gone through startup turning things off, but if you can backup data and reinstall the os I think you'll see a world of difference.
 
I'm stumped...

Consensus is that the CPU (even stock) is powerfull enough, the chipset is fine, I'm running just about as much RAM (dual) as Vista can handle, the PC is "clean" so not sure what to do next besides waiting for Win7 and then buying 4x 1GB in the hope that improves things?

Any last thoughts?
 
you could do that. I don't like mixing numbers up but if you're keeping a 32bit os then yeah, it's workable.

have you got any way to free up some of your HD for a bit to partition and try the 64bit win 7?

That way you shouldn't have to play around with odd numbers of ram

Yes did notice that recently, more than enough space on the secondary drive so will move later. I'll let you know what I find performance wise ;)
 
I don't think reinstalling the os would improve anything that a defrag wouldn't.

Yes, if the os was on a single HD then windows should work quicker as there less files to access.

I've never personally used more than 50% of any hard drive. I seem to buy a new pc everything 18 months or so and by that time I just get a bigger HD if I needed it
 
Defrag doesn't work so well if there's only 10% space free. I've noticed there's a mostly empty terabyte drive, can you move most of the data on the c drive onto this one instead? (then defrag/reinstall)
 
I'm stumped...

Consensus is that the CPU (even stock) is powerfull enough, the chipset is fine, I'm running just about as much RAM (dual) as Vista can handle, the PC is "clean" so not sure what to do next besides waiting for Win7 and then buying 4x 1GB in the hope that improves things?

Any last thoughts?

i can highly recommend windows 7 RC x64 free from microsoft and works untill after win7 is released that way you just preorder win7 for about £70 (was £50 but that ended when stock run out about a week ago) that way you don't have to spend more money on vista and giving you some money to put towards more ram

edit: here's a link to the win7 RC clicky i have been running it for a while now with no problems, i'm so happy with it i have it on my laptop, game pc and kids pc and yet to have a problem with it and it's much faster that vista
 
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