Performance - Limiting Factors?

HI;

I have problems with programs "Not Responding" at random times. Most of the time they snap out of it, many times they need to be closed and re-opened.

I've monitored my memory use and have never seen more than about 6 out of my 8 GB being used at one time.

Here is a sample of what I would frequently have running when I see the hanging & "Not Responding":

FireFox 5 to 10 windows open
Chrome 5-10 windows open
Picasa - Usually spends at least several hours a day uploading
Frequently running a YouTube or other video uploads via a browser window
A couple office documents open
Files coping in the background.

There are times I have other things open, but that gives you an idea.

Looking at task manager and Resource Monitor;
Memory currently at 5.8GB out of 8GB
Processor running around 15%
The disk says 96% Highest active time

So it looks like to me, that the speed of the hard drive is bottle neck in my system.

Does it sound like a faster hard drive might address my issues, or Does it sound like something else is causing the "Not Responding".

It seems to me from what I am seeing in the performance monitor that I have more than enough ram available and that the i7 processor is barely being used.

Thanks for any guidance.

Jamie

jamiedolan,
Do you happen to have the spec's of your hard drive or drives, model numbers and such.

linnemeyerhere said:

jamiedolan,
Do you happen to have the spec's of your hard drive or drives, model numbers and such.

I have 2 externals connected, however, the external drives were just connected in the past few days for back-up purposes.

The internal, is the primary disk I work off of:

WDC WD1001FALS-00J7B0 1TB

If you view the second page of this PDF file, my drive is listed in the far right column.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/librar...879-701276.pdf

It does appear from that chart that this is entry level, at least compared to the other drives on that chart.

I don't know how to evaluate if the HD is my bottle neck and if so, what kind of drive I would have to move up to. I'm currently running windows backup in the background, and uploading photos to two different places. The computer can't even show the text here as fast as I type it.

If there are any performance programs or anything you want me to run, I can do that as soon as this really slow windows backup completes.

Thanks very much in advance.

Jamie

I know there are some "speed" tweaks for Firefox which pre-cache pages from links on the site(s) you are viewing. While I've generally had good luck with this it does sometimes cause it to hiccup. Don't know if there's something comparable with Chrome because I don't use it.

You've got a decent Internet connection speed and certainly have enough RAM, but it does appear that you are heavy on the bandwidth usage with that many different things running. It might be worth it to try various combination's of the programs you listed, opening them one at a time, then see at what point it chokes.

I haven't had it for a good while, but during the Win 7 Beta period I had all sorts of trouble with youtube stuttering.

profdlp said:

I haven't had it for a good while, but during the Win 7 Beta period I had all sorts of trouble with youtube stuttering.

One thing I realized is that I spend a lot of time uploading via the browser to services like YouTube and FaceBook because they have no clients for upload. Perhaps this is part of the problem. I just had FireFox crash on me again, it just stopped responding while I was writing a forum post here. I was uploading photos to FaceBook in another browser window.

Maybe I'll setup my Windows 7 Sony VAIO Laptop and try to use that for all my uploads and see if that makes a difference. Then I can just leave that computer to run with some uploads running and nothing else.

The amount of times the programs on this machine just Hangs really seems odd to me for a machine this fast.

I do have the Windows Defender thing installed. I wondered if that slowed things down, but since I don't see the processor being used very much, I am not sure that is the problem.

Thanks

Jamie

Julio Cortez said:

Is it possible (again, consider that this is just a guess so it may well be wrong) that software hangs while trying to access the HD so it won't respond until it gets the needed data from it?

I agree, this seems like the most likely guess to me as well. I don't know how to solve / deal with this other than by getting a faster hard drive. I will try and run some of my uploads from my laptop and see if that helps solve the problem.

I'll like to some how nail down that the slow hard drive is the true cause of the problem before I go out and buy some high speed drive.

I wonder if I put my files onto an external USB drive, then uploaded them from there, I wonder if that would help, because it would keep the system disk free for, running the system and programs. What do you think?

Jamie

Julio Cortez said:

My two cents (not being an expert, though): I'd run the Windows Experience test first, to try and see where the bottleneck is (even if in the most of the cases it's the HD).

Yes, I confirmed that the Windows Experience test does show my hard drive as being the slowest component in the system.

jamie,
I checked and your WD hard drive is fine. Yes 64mb of cache is better but 32 is still a solid performer.

I might suggest looking into a SSD but it will make the programs and OS load faster but as all the data will still reside on the spinner and your saying that it hangs from time to time, this could still happen. You may want to test the drive for it's general health. I have moved to a Sata III SSD for my OS and App's. and man in my opinion it's been the biggest single component upgrade I've ever done. And as a 60-80gb SSD can be had for around $120.00 with more advancements in this coming soon this would be on my serious watch list !