Slow pc loading.

[nibbler]

Recently I have noticed that the pc is very slow to get started, taking upwards of 3 minutes to be useable. Obviously I realise that with a mechanical hard drive these kinds of problems always exist, but I think mine is slower thatn it should be. Now I tried upping the speed of the RAM (don't ask me why, thought I might as well...) to 1955mhz @ cas8 but that has, unsuprisingly, made no difference. I'm running 64bit windows 7 Pro, with 4GB RAM, an i5 750 at 3.7GHz and a rather dated sata maxtor 200gb harddrive. I would assume that is holding me back I recently defragmented which made almost no difference and within 2 days it's already as badly fragmented as it was before. Is there anything that can be done, or is it just time to get a new HD, in which case should I get a 500GB WD/sammy for about £35 or should I save up for a boot drive and keep this liability of a hard disk for storage. Bearing in mind that I have never managed to use even more than 100GB of filespace, what is the best course of action?

[Phage]

Do you have a budget in mind ?

[Terbinator]

Like all things it comes down to your budget, or your foreseeable one at least.

[Domestic_Ginger]

For the time being reinstall windows on the first partion and make it about 30gb. mine is 20 and it appears to be too small. Too much crap keeps appearing and filling it up. I am unable to find where it is coming from. Then save everything else to another partition.

I have a 250gb hitachi which after doing the above was alot faster but has slowed down some now. I'm interested in a Sammy too so have been saving the pennies. the 1/2gb and 1gb seem to be about the same speed; would appreciate if anyone else knows better.

[nibbler]

I reckon I would save up for an intel x25-v at the very most. So really it's a trade off between lots of fastish capacity and not much very fast capacity combined with unreliable slow capacity

[nibbler]

For the time being reinstall windows on the first partion and make it about 30gb. mine is 20 and it appears to be too small. Too much crap keeps appearing and filling it up. I am unable to find where it is coming from. Then save everything else to another partition.

I have a 250gb hitachi which after doing the above was alot faster but has slowed down some now. I'm interested in a Sammy too so have been saving the pennies. the 1/2gb and 1gb seem to be about the same speed; would appreciate if anyone else knows better.

I got win7 on an educational discount so I just have the key and a dvd with it copyed onto it. If I create a partition then separate from all my files I can keep everything that is installed? Will windows mind if I reinstall, or will they think I am trying to double register my copy?

[kalniel]

Unless it's on it's way out the hard drive shouldn't be holding you up that badly.

A fresh windows reinstall and making sure not to clutter startup with programs is probably going to do more than anything else, and you'd have to do it anyway if moving to a new boot hard drive.

PS what are you doing to fragment the hard drive so badly? Mine hardly fragments at all under windows 7, and the built-in defragmentor works a treat.

[nibbler]

I'm using auslogics defragmentor. I could try the built in one. I don't know how to do partitions etc unfortunately, in terms of keeping data that is. I don't want to lose my data, either it stays on the HD while I reinstall or i wait till i get some sort of new storage media.

[Terbinator]

I say pip for a F3 now. I wouldn't spend the £80 on a V-25 as there simply isn't enough room on there. Save your money and make the speed jump later this year with the new Intel drives.

[jim]

I'd go for the F3 as well.

It won't change your world, but it's a good drive, and it won't cost much in comparison to other PC components. Fresh install of Windows will be the other thing to do.

Having said that, have you run any disk scanning tools on the drive, just to see if it's got any problems? Seatools or something similar?

[scaryjim]

If you could stretch to £113 you could get a second-gen 64GB Kingston V-Series. They're not as quick as an Intel, but they're competitive with most mainstream SSDs at a value price. The 128GB version is only £199, which is even batter value...

You could also try trimming down your start-up processes: if you've got a typical usage patterm you'll probably find that about 20 different little widgets try to load themselves into memory at startup, which I'd guess will be the main cause. A fresh install would get rid of these, but they do build up quite quickly.

Otherwise I'd go with your "budget" option of a single platter drive. You might not need 500GB, but I'm not sure if the saving's big enough to make it worth not getting a 500GB, tbh

[Domestic_Ginger]

I got win7 on an educational discount so I just have the key and a dvd with it copyed onto it. If I create a partition then separate from all my files I can keep everything that is installed? Will windows mind if I reinstall, or will they think I am trying to double register my copy?

It should be fine; I do it occasionally. If you have no backup media then you can partion your hard drive with some third party software; not sure exactly what to use but someone will recommend something. (If anyone has a better wasy of doing this then please shout!)

Split your HDD into a 150gb (first) and 70gb (second) partition.
Copy everything you want to save to the 70gb partition. Steam will do backups if you point it in the right direction. As you are reading and writing from the sam drive it will be quite slow.
Boot from windows CD and delete 150gb partion. Make 30gb (not sure what is optimal) and install windows on it.
I would make another 100gb partition for programs in windows using partition manager so you end
up with 30gb (system) 100gb (programs) 70gb (storage for the slow stuff).
I suppose you could make a windows backup on storage just after you have installed drives etc; whenever you get slow down just reinstall windows.

Even if you go for the F3 then make a 50gb system partion and use the same principle. For the fastest HDD It is probably a worthwhile investment.

[nibbler]

The f3 is better than a caviar blue then? I think that's what I'll get when I have the money

[Terbinator]

The f3 is better than a caviar blue then? I think that's what I'll get when I have the money

Yes. I think the only competition the F3 has is the Barracuda .12 as they trade blows in various tests but the F3 seems to come out on top overall.

[mycarsavw]

For the time being reinstall windows on the first partion and make it about 30gb. mine is 20 and it appears to be too small. Too much crap keeps appearing and filling it up. I am unable to find where it is coming from. Then save everything else to another partition.

Get this.

If you use ZoneAlarm search your PC for a file called tvdebug.log.

I had the same issue with two machines just running out of diskspace for no obvious reason. That ^ log file grew to well over 50Gb.

[Domestic_Ginger]

I can find the folder its in but can not find the files themselves if that makes any sense. Its windows up to its old tricks of saving everything. It seems to delete some of the detritus on reboot. I'll give the linki a whirl; fanks.