Bloat without the power

[jj2007]

Windows 7-64 just updated itself, fine. Rebooted, clicked on Firefox and Thunderbird and ... wait ... wait ... they take minutes to load. M$ Visual Studio Community takes a clever approach, it greets you after 1-2 seconds with a splash screen, but then it takes 130 seconds to load a hello world proggie.

In contrast, MS Word takes just 10 seconds, too much for an i5 but acceptable in comparison; RichMasm (from scratch, directly after reboot) takes less than a second to load itself, and less than a second to load 33k lines of code.

This machine gets more and more sluggish, and I don't know what to do. 125 GB free on harddisk, 4 GB RAM. Control Panel, Windows performance says it's a great machine, with 4.7 of 7.9 possible points, and video card being the weakest point.

Code Select Expand

Componente Dettagli Punteggio parziale Punteggio base
Processore Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz 7.0 4.7
  Determinato dal punteggio parziale più basso

Memoria (RAM) 4.00 GB 5.9
Scheda video Intel(R) HD Graphics Family 4.7
Grafica dei giochi 1760 Memoria totale disponibile per la grafica in megabyte 6.4
Disco rigido primario 126GB disponibili (448GB totale) 5.9
Windows 7 Home Premium

Fortunately, everything that has to do with my coding is fast, as usual - UAsm does it in about 20,000 lines per second. The problem is really the bloatware that they are forcing down our throats. Firefox has done nothing significant so far (SMF is a liteweight engine), but it has grabbed already 600MB of working space. Why???

[sinsi]

Because everything nowadays is .net

I have a program with 20-odd controls (static, edit).
Using the latest (common control manifest, ml14) my program takes ~5 seconds to show.
Using no manifest and ml6 it loads instantly.

Speed up a laptop? Easy - install an SSD. Major improvement.

[jj2007]

Speed up a laptop? Easy - install an SSD. Major improvement.

Just had a look at some threads related to SSD reliability. Ehmmm (my highlighting )...:

gamebrigada

From my enterprise experience:

    Samsung: I've yet to see one fail. Far over 1000 in use. Models we use: SM863, SM951, 950 PRO, 950 EVO, 960 PRO, 960 EVO.
    Intel: I don't have any that aren't dead. Probably around 30 total. Wait, just one, an old SLC drive still in its packaging. That one is a Schrodinger, both alive and dead at the same time. We just stay away from them now, after the 8mb bug that they kept telling us was our fault, after countless times losing all data, we gave up and refuse to buy them.
    Crucial: Very cheap, and reliable. Several hundred in use, now mostly as secondary storage, as they are fairly slow. Model: M500
    SanDisk: I hate these things. Model: A110. We call them dumb sticks. They suck ass and don't have a compatible alternative. Failure rate around 60%. Their firmware doesn't help, although they are happy to constantly replace them. I've seen 4 fail in one laptop in the course of about 2 months.
    Kingston: We have tons of these in use and they work great. My only gripe with them, is that they change hardware in their drives that effects promised performance without telling anyone. Failure rate I would say around 5% over the course of about 5 years.

Western Digital is releasing the same drive under both their WD and SanDisk brands. Under the stickers, the hardware is identical.

[hutch--]

JJ,

I would second the idea of using an SSD. On both my older i7 and this Haswell I have an SSD, the i7 has a an SSD of about 450 gig which I use as the boot drive with Win7 64 and it takes a normal SATA2/3 plug. The Haswell has an Intel PCIEx4 SSD but it was an expensive one. For a boot drive, any modern SSD is more reliable than a HDD so it may be a good option for you.

[zedd151]

[hijack]
SSD's are the wave of the future. I know they are faster than HDD's, just how much faster I wonder.

Not talking about the mfrs specs  but in real world usage. Had anyone here done a study on ssd vs hdd? Would be interesting to see a shootout match between the two. Like when you'd first get the ssd and copy the hdd to the ssd. Time bootup, large file movements  and the like before the switch and after...

[/unhijack]   

[hutch--]

Z,

The fastest HDD I have (a WD Black 4tb) clocks at about 180 meg/sec. The Intel SSD I am using writes at about 990 meg/sec and reads over 2000 meg / sec. In my i7 with Win7 64 I have a cheap (sortof) Sandisk of about 450 meg that clocks about 450 - 500 meg read and write. Its not a contest.

There are faster if you want to pay for them, some of the very recent Samsung SSDs are faster again.

[anunitu]

I have ben nibbling around SSD's,but still kind of pricey for my budget.

[anunitu]

I did buy a 2 tb drive for my ps4,and footprint wise,pretty small in size.

[Lonewolff]

Not talking about the mfrs specs  but in real world usage. Had anyone here done a study on ssd vs hdd? Would be interesting to see a shootout match between the two. Like when you'd first get the ssd and copy the hdd to the ssd. Time bootup, large file movements  and the like before the switch and after...

Massive difference in real world performance.  :t

[sinsi]

[hijack]
SSD's are the wave of the future. I know they are faster than HDD's, just how much faster I wonder.

Not talking about the mfrs specs  but in real world usage. Had anyone here done a study on ssd vs hdd? Would be interesting to see a shootout match between the two. Like when you'd first get the ssd and copy the hdd to the ssd. Time bootup, large file movements  and the like before the switch and after...

[/unhijack]   

Boot time on an average spec laptop to a usable desktop went from 2+ minutes to around 20 seconds.
Starting apps (MS Word, Adobe Reader, Chrome etc) is virtually instant.
This was a cloned drive, not a fresh install of Windows, so all the crap was still there.

Use a 120G SSD for Windows and programs (AU$59) and a 2TB HDD drive for data (AU$78), speedy.
Four HDDs in RAID 0+1 will speed things up too (and keep your data safe).

In the time I've had my two SSDs (over 4 years, still showing 100%) three HDDs have died  :(

[Lonewolff]

SSD's are pretty reliable. My main system SSD is now 8 years old and still showing full health.

Only time I have fried an SSD is when I hooked it up to a TV as a recording device. I didn't realise that the TV was constantly writing to it (so you could rewind live TV) and it lasted about a week. 

[zedd151]

My main system SSD is now 8 years old and still showing full health

Sounds positive.  :icon14:

Massive difference in real world performance.  :t

Even better...

In the time I've had my two SSDs (over 4 years, still showing 100%) three HDDs have died  :(

I knew there had to be a catch.   :(


I'm pretty sure that the technology will improve with time. But just in case, always good to make frequent backups. (from one who knows all to well.   :P

[Lonewolff]

In the time I've had my two SSDs (over 4 years, still showing 100%) three HDDs have died

I took this as meaning the SSD's have never failed him.

[zedd151]

In the time I've had my two SSDs (over 4 years, still showing 100%) three HDDs have died

I took this as meaning the SSD's have never failed him.

You  are 100% correct, I misread it.  lol
I thought it had said 3 ssd's had died. Thats what happens when you read without paying  attention .   :P

[hutch--]

They fail for different reasons, a HDD fails mechanically and sometime the electronics fail where the better end of SSDs slowly wear out which means the chips start to lose their read/write capacity. Most HDDs last OK but I have lost the odd one from time to time. My old i7 with Win7 64 dropped a boot disk and even though I could read/write to it, the backup software would not read it so I lost the whole boot drive and had to install again. I build machines with multiple HDDs for both storage and redundancy, if you have your important stuff backed up on multiple drive and on multiple machines you can survive a HDD failure.

The old i7 now has a 450 gig SSD as its boot drive so its probably safe until the board claps out with old age but the disk should still be able to be read on another box.