P.J. Alling wrote:
My current desktop was bought with the idea that it was easily overclocked. I wasn't planning to do any serious overclocking, but if I needed a little extra speed, it was there. Well a few operations were taking more time than seemed reasonable so after making sure this machine wasn't infected with some type of Virus I decided what the hell, might as well see what it could do. So having installed the "easy", don't know why I used quotes it actually is easy, to use software. I set it all up, and noticed no change what so ever. All the various statistics say the machine should be faster, but it just doesn't seem that way. Bus speed, Memory, Processor speed all increased by just under 20%, but none of the things I was interested in speeding up happens any faster. Sheesh.
System optimization is often grossly misunderstood, even by programmers. There are special tools that (wise) programmers can use to find out where the performance bottlenecks are. But, since you don't have access to the source code, we can take a higher level approach at the problem.
1) What hardware, OS and software are you running when you have this problem? What sort of hard drives do you have?
2) Which specific operations are taking a lot more time? If you get the spinny "wait while I think about it" wheel, when you are opening files, it probably isn't your processor that's slowing you down.
3) Often times running low on certain system resources can make a huge difference in performance, when the system can no longer use quick, easy to access storage (memory) to store data when it changes tasks, but has to store it off to much slower (spinny hard drives) secondary or tertiary storage. This is why SSDs can make a huge difference in performance.
4) If you're doing something that takes advantage of your GPU for processing, upgrading your video card could make a bigger difference than upgrading your processor.
It's like using a cheap kit lens on a high end body. If the sensor is outresolving the lens, more megapixels aren't going to make your pictures any sharper. Or for that matter, supercharging the motor in your car when you're running on skinny bias ply tires. It doesn't matter how much horsepower you have if you can't get it to the ground.
-- Larry Colen [email protected] (postbox on min4est) -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
