Wow you guys are really into it. Your all right. When i was an IT mgr overseeing a performance group in a large 360/370 installation the thing we always looked at was the amount of paging or thrashing done by our DASD (disks), multiple reads done to your paging drive will bring any system to its knees. You really want to keep as much of the application as possible resident in memory. Ideally to have the entire app in memory is ideal but will never happen. So when Jimbo says buy faster drives hes absolutly right but when you compare milli sec (disk access times)to micro sec (memory access times) ther isnt a drive out ther that compete with memory. Fake is right on when hes says "If you have a crappy hard disk, disable your page file, buy 4 gigs of ram and run completely off ram, this will stop page faults (swapping of memory to the hard drive and vice versa) which is a huge performance gainer.." or configure a raid drive and use 2 drives in tandem. Enought has not been said about performance in a PC. For instance nothing has been mentioned about tuning your memory to your FEB that your MB is capable of handling. that boosted my rating up .2 points. I'm, currently running 6 gig an do a mixture of video and gaming. Im satisfied with my performance but its not only the amount of memory, the speed of your drives, the speed of your cpu, or the speed of your front end bus. It's the way you bring all these components together in a harmonous way using each to augment the other. Thats why i still build my own system when i need another. I really wonder about dell and hp and the rest of these manufacturs bout the time they spend really tuning their systems. I haven't seen a good "store bought" system. But thats another topic. For now I'll enjoy the snappiness of 7232. LOL
