ok ive got a celeron 1.8ghz pc + 512mb ram with a 20gb 5200 rpm hdd as C:\> and
it seems to run really chunky in windows. things like opening up winamp takes a good 5 seconds and its really frustrating.
i know this processor is supposed to run faster than this. would you be placing the blame on the hdd or something else perhaps?
i was under the impression theres not a huge noticible difference between a 5200 and 7200 drive, unless your running like games benchmarks or something like that


natty needs help :(

Well it's old and they are slow as compared to 7200 ones I reckon.

Just did a test on mine and winamp loaded up in about 1 second. I only have a 7200 speed drive and 2gig RAM.

8-)

Celeron...
That's your problem.

celerons arent that bad...

it could be a combination of things... are you using winamp 5? or 2.x?

taking 5 seconds to load winamp 5, if you have modern skins turned on is probably perfectly acceptable for that computer...

Try maybe defraging the hard drive.

c'mon..

we're talking about winamp here

edit: will give that a go mongie

last edited by nat at 11:46:54 09/Feb/06

Winamp 5 does take an eternity to load. Go back to the 2.XX versions and try again.

or just use Winamp 5.x lite (the no video version)

A 5200rpm hard drive does slow things down a lot, but then so does a celeron...

ok lets forget about winamp for a second. its like, uber slow with everything in general.....internet explorer, opening up microsoft word xp, etc.
im sure ive seen celerons like this perform much better in windows

so, basically, has anyone ever had any first hand experience comparing 5200rpm drives to 7200rpm ones, and if so, did you notice any significant performance difference with windowzy type stuff (internet explorer, microsoft word, etc etc)

Did it always perform this badly? Perhaps you've just got too much s*** running in the background and your system is choked up.

yeh it ran this slow right after a format :(

You will not notice any major difference between a 5200 HD and a 7200 HD running on a Celeron. Your problem could be a million other things like drivers or MB etc but it won't be your hd unless of course it is faulty which is always high in probability with older drives like the one your using. Try some hd tests on it first to determine if it is functioning as it should and if it is then look at drivers especially the chipset drivers.

ok, cool. i'll give that a go

I can't believe you guys... sweet damn...
everything WILL be faster on a 7200rpm hard drive. by quite a considerable amount.
the 5200rpm hdd's run at like 1/3 of the newer hdd's speeds. It's one of the two things I upgrade in someone's old pc if they don't have the cash for a full PC. 512mb of ram is adequate, but is it DDR/RDRAM/SDRAM?? if it's SDRAM, compared to DDR ram, there's a rather large speed decrease in applications in windows. Remember that your page file is also running on the old chunker 5200rpm too, so whatever loads into VMEM is also going slower too.

1.check for virus's/trojan's/spyware/pests
2.scandisk
3.defrag (doesnt matter if it says it doesnt need it, keep doing it until theres no red)
4.turn off all startup items (start>run>msconfig>startup>disable all)
5.if its still slow as s***, then it is most probably your hardware

id be ditching the celeron as well yo

Get a faster drive..
I had a similar issue way back ages ago and getting the faster drive made a huge diff - I went from 5200rpm to a 7200rpm 8mb cached SATA and it was way quicker (that an I had it in a Raid0 config as well)

Just got 2x Raptors in Raid0 at my work as of yesterday an I'm enjoying that as well =)

My laptop has a 5200rpm drive and it totally, f***ing, sucks.

ok ive got a celeron 1.8ghz pc + 512mb ram with a 20gb 5200 rpm hdd as C:\>

IMO, ymmv:

The biggest problem with celerons is the stripped down L2 cache. Cache memory is expensive because its the fastest in your system. Having CPU instructions sent out to RAM is like having runtime application data residing in your OS's page file.

I used to run a lot of celeron based systems but I refuse to even consider them these days - they're not worth the hassle.

Having data being read via a slow hard disk connection will affect application and data load / read time, and is a particularly nasty bottleneck if you're doing a lot of reading and writing to disk because RAM is low.

how bad does a 5200rpm hd slow everything down?

Obviously in your case, quite a lot :). Yeah like everyone said if you can affort to upgrade get a newer faster drive. If not simul's advise it a good step to perform before you do anything drastic.

it makes a huge difference. upgrade it.

look out the way, mr hardware's here
moo, opec and eric the red knows the score
it makes a HUGE difference
so does 2mb cache vs 8mb cache
but ata100 vs ata133 doesn't make very much difference at all
neither does ata100 8mb cache vs sata 8mb cache
but 5400rpm drive SUCK

roger that

thanks fellas !

Remember that your page file is also running on the old chunker 5200rpm too, so whatever loads into VMEM is also going slower too.

You're right a slow hard drive is a major bottleneck with dealing anything with the drive. However, more ram lessons the amount of page/cache files need to be accessed. So, the best upgrade path depends on what is happening on the users computer.

I'd upgrade both.