Making do with what i have

Graham00

Graham00

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Graham Mc
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I can't afford a new machine but i'm running -

Windows XP 32 bit (OS)
Pentium 4 - 2.8 ghz processor
320 GB HDD (new -replaced old 120 GB)
2.25GB RAM (non expandable anymore)

The IE browser runs slowly and occasional lock up !
i regurlarly run Be Clean, also run AVG 2011 Antivirus, Photoshop Elements can take ages to fully pixelate a RAW image proir to editing.

Bottom line is there anything i can do to speed up my 7yr old machine ?
 
CCleaner will clear out a lot of old tat, defrag wouldn't do any harm either along with disk cleanup from the windows tools section
 
Not really sure what you're expecting.... A 7 year old machine is just that, a 7 year old machine with 7 year old performance. A 2.8GHz Pentium 4 gets a score of 416 at this benchmark site: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php My overclocked i7-2600k gets 11160 on the same benchmark suite. I always factor an upgrade after 3 years - you're 2 and a bit upgrades behind....
 
Is CCleaner better than BeClean ?
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Never used BeClean, but CCleaner is excellent and pretty much the standard for a freebie cleaner , run the cleaner and registry cleaner too, gets rid of the tat left behind from uninstalling programs

Also investigate how much hard drive memory Elements uses when RAM is used up, think its in preferences and believe there is a cache in there too which gets full and can harm performance.

I had my old machine refurbished with new processor (AMD Phenom) motherboard, hard drive and DDR3 RAM, kept the old case, DVD burner etc and didn't cost a fortune at the local computer shop. Made a world of difference and runs LR3/PSE9 at a goodly rate, XP 32 bit doesn't recognise more than 3GB of RAM so no point going mad with it
 
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Mine's 1156 on that site..........

.....faster than a speeding bullet, although I do feel and i5 coming on soon!

Anyway back to the problem.

My advice would be to ditch AVG and see if things speed up.

If they do, use Security Essentials, Avast or Avira.

If they don't, have a wee rummage in the BIOS and see if you can do any overclocking.

Otherwise, time to spend some money and knock the Arad fella off his benchmarking perch!
 
Mikesphotaes said:
Otherwise, time to spend some money and knock the Arad fella off his benchmarking perch!
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There's a couple of people on here who have slightly faster setups than mine :(
 
PS, yes, I ditched AVG a good few years ago. Avast or MSE appear to be the best free ones available at the moment (although Avast is adding features that I keep turning off on fresh installs so maybe that will go the way of AVG soonish....)
 
and registry cleaner too, gets rid of the tat left behind from uninstalling programs
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Registry cleaners aren't that specific. They wipe any supposed orphaned entries, they are highly inaccurate and have a fairly high risk attached to running them. There is also very little performance gain from "cleaning" your registry. They cause more harm than benefit.

There are a ton of tips floating about the internet on how to speed XP up, you should be able to get it faster fairly easily - but as arad said it's 7 years old. You're never going to get near the speed of a new PC.
 
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