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Need More Speed 
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Spends far too much time on here
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:59 pm
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Location: Sestriere, Piemonte, Italia
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My housemate runs Windows 7 on the following:
C2Q 8400
8gig
Samsung EVO 840 120gig

He has a bunch of storage HDDs attached and uses uTorrent heavily. He says the system is becoming slow with browsing, general Windows usage, but especially when uTorrent is running (he does A LOT of seeding - over fibre). The HDD where he currently has his main download directory is from 2009 and is making noises like it might be struggling.

I'm wondering how much difference a cheap upgrade will make. Any ideas?

I'm wondering if the following individual changes would make a difference:
1) Replacing the ancient HDD?
2) Clean Windows install?
3) Moving to DDR3?
4) Moving to SATA III for both his SSD and a potential new HDD?

Looking at benches, a C2Q 8400 would be beaten by a current Pentium, but not by loads and he'd lose 2 cores. That said, he doesn't game or work. It's a glorified media box with a browser basically.

Would love your thoughts, as even a cheap CPU, RAM, mobo, HDD combo will run £250. Thanks.


Mon Jun 22, 2015 6:56 pm
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I haven't seen my friends in so long
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Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:37 am
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It sounds like a new hdd is needed as a matter of urgency anyway before the existing one dies which it sound like it might be teetering on the edge off already.

Clean install of Windows would clean out any underlying cruft that's built up over time and has the benefit of being free.

As for the rest that sounds more like a new budget build rather than getting more life out of the existing rig.

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Mon Jun 22, 2015 9:02 pm
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Spends far too much time on here
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So, get the HDD first and reinstall, then see where things are?


Mon Jun 22, 2015 10:46 pm
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How much of his bandwidth does he allow for his torrents? Does he have any shaping or throttling of the torrents running when he is browsing? If not, then that is a probable the reason for slow browsing.

When I was torrenting SUSE a lot, I had problems with downloading pages, even though most traffic was outbound. Even though it was only using about 30% of my download, it was using nearly 90% of my upload capacity and web sites were incredibly slow as a result. Pausing the torrents while I was browsing or doing other things helped a lot.

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Tue Jun 23, 2015 3:50 am
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I haven't seen my friends in so long
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Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 6:37 am
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okenobi wrote:
So, get the HDD first and reinstall, then see where things are?

Well, it sounds like he'll probably lose the existing hard drive to mechanical failure pretty soon anyway so unless that's not an issue that's definitely the bit I'd sort first.

I assume from the OP that the slow down is noticeable even with the torrents not running?

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Tue Jun 23, 2015 9:24 am
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Spends far too much time on here
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Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:59 pm
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Hmmm.... Dave, great point. I'll look at that first, thanks.

As for noticeable slow down all the time, I'm not 100%. I'll fiddle with uTorrent and go from there, but I think the HDD needs doing either way, as you say.


Tue Jun 23, 2015 10:38 pm
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