PC Latency Experience

[Drarkan]

Just wanted to put out there that since I upgraded to 5 accounts I was experiencing a drop in computer performance. I thought it was my video card, which indeed did need an upgrade, so I persuaded my better half to gift it to me for XMas (done so by printing out an NCIX page detailing the card ) and uppon doing that, still had some latency issues. Just recently I installed TuneUp Utilities 2011, and since configuring and optimizing those settings, I must say I am impressed with the outcome. My computer now runs smoothly while running my 5 accounts, ran Nero Rom 10 in the background to burn a DVD, and run some other programs at the same time, where before it would overwhelm my system and sometimes cause me to restart my computer via old-school shutdown procedure (hitting the restart button on the tower). This program optimized my startup programs, to eliminate those programs which were doing nothing, causing a drain on my system, told me which background programs that were running that may not be needed, disabled some windows graphic features, like sliding menus, shadows on windows, cursors, etc... and much more. All of this combined helped out my situation a lot. This program will also run system checks, defrag operations on your drives, registry, and clear unneeded files from your drive, (like all that pr0n you don't want your wife to find )

K thats all, just thought I'd put that out there for people who may have had the same issues I had.

[Tim]

I actually believe it very much so. There is a reason why a completely fresh reinstall of Windows can often speed up your PC incredibly, so I think it would make sense for 3rd party software that "reverts" a lot of things in Windows back to its original state would help out. Right?

[Drarkan]

Yes, theres nothing like a good old reinstall of windows. Problem is I have so many files on different drives that I don't have a free drive to do a full reinstall, plus after I install programs I have to either faux link them back to the menu and desktop or what not, by copy paste method, or do a reinstall of my programs. I would rather get an SSD drive for my windows OS only and have nothing else on there, except perhaps WOW, which I can then keep a backup on a HDD so when I do have to wipe it i just restore wow after the full reinstall of windows. I think my limit of drives is used up though even though i have more open sata slots on my Mobo. but for some reason, when I have the other drives connected they don't read. I think I have to research how to expand my raid drives but I haven't had the time to do any of that stuff for a while since now I run a business and when I relax I play wow. But my time will be freed up more in the next few weeks and perhaps I'll do some searches and see if I can get my 4th sata drive reading from my mobo since external drives are much slower for large data transfer.

[Ualaa]

You could use an external drive, purely for temporary storage. Allowing you to format an internal drive or upgrade a smaller internal drive to a larger drive.

I'd think one of the newer SSD's, large enough for both the OS and your top current 3-4 games, running Windows 7 for TRIM command and 20-30GB of unused space for its memory controller to play with, might be the way to go.

Then several 2TB drives for storage, if you really need that much space.

I'm looking at an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (OS/WoW) + a pair of 2TB drives, as my likely upgrades this summer. Possibly a video card too, as mine is slowly in the process of dying.

[Drarkan]

Nice, yeah atm my OS/wow/programs is on a 200gb HDD, one 1tb drive storage, 2tb drive for programs and storage, and old OS on a 500gb HDD currently broken, hoping to retrieve the data from it some day.

I want a newer Mobo, Processor, I have a decent graphics card just last xmas but perhaps a second one i can bridge. Maybe this summer I can try to pull that off too.

[Tim]

Ualaa, do you have a favorite brand of HD to use?

I personally use Seagate, and have around 30 of them literally, all between 1.5 and 2.0TB size. They have worked great for me, however, I am always scared about the horror stories I hear from other people.

EDIT: I've had 1 drive fail 1 day after using it, thats about it.