What to buy??

[fluffy01016]

Hi All.  After some advice on the best route for my next PC.  I've currently got an old AMD A6-5400k desktop with 8gb of RAM and its starting to be very slow these days.  I don't play any games and just use for internet and streaming from my HDD.  I've a few media streamers in the house that access music and video from the desktop and i also use plex on my main TV.  i was thinking about an i7-8550u Laptop but not sure if it would be up to what i currently do?  I'm guessing it will as it'll have the same amount of memory but a faster CPU?  I also have 4x HDD in the desktop and would look to just get 1x 2tb internal drive to replace the 4x smaller ones.  Not sure if this will be impacting the speed but guessing so.

 

Anyway, any advice would be appreciated please

 

cheers 

[robt100]

If its not used for gaming or anything, then theres probably no need to update barely anything. I reckon another 8gb of Ram just incase, and then switching to SSDs rather than old fashions HDDs will make all the difference. Unless your motherboard doesnt support SATA3, but then again, you can always get the PCIe based drives? Most of that probably sounds gibberish so I apologise!

I guess after writing all that, what is it thats actually slow? Booting up? loading internet pages? Video playback?

[fluffy01016]

Booting up is fine but it just seems to take ages to do anything when waking from standby. I’m not running any programs in the background and can only put it down to the PC struggling with windows 10 and the media being streamed

[robt100]

Standby drops everything into RAM. Personally I really hate using stanby as one power cut can cause a lot of damage. IF its put into standy whilst streaming a show or two it could be the lack of RAM thats the issue, as when that is full itll put everything into a page file, which means its all put on the hard drive which is pretending its RAM, and then goes very slowly.

Although, just researching your problem briefly.....when were your graphics drivers last updated? Seems AMD's drivers can conflict with win10 causing a slow wake from standby, may be worth uninstalling then installing the latest to see if it helps.

[xman]

Get an SDD (128gb min) as drive C:

 

Rebuild the PC, reinstall the OS (Win10 is a bloated pig, maybe consider Win7 instead), spend time stripping out the bloatware, add an ad/malware blocking hosts file. Only add absolutely necessary software. DONT install any antivirus software, its all bullsh%t cr@p slows your system to a crawl and steals your data anyway. Stick to the microsoft antivirus whatever they call it nowadays. If you insist on using Win10 do some research to remove all that Tile cr@p they keep downloading, turn off whatever her name is.

 

Then spend time cleaning your HDD of the years of accumulated cr@p, reorganise your data and folders, do diskclean, ccleaner, and optimise those Hard disks.

 

It will fly again, tons faster than original, faster than that bloated one in the shop you've got your eye on. And all you did was spend £80.

 

If youve got spare memory slots, then put some more memory in it to help it cope with your wannabee data centre/server secret desire.

 

Btw I have a couple of Win7/10 boxes Amd Phenom 950 4gb / Llano A8-3870k quad core 8gb, both boot up from cold in about 10 seconds.

Edited 24 September, 2018 by xman

[io1901]

Why a laptop you'll get more disk space, ram, and CPU power for you money if you get a desktop based PC?

 

The laptop might be OK, but lots seem to thermally throttle under heavy load as the cooling in them isn't really up to it. we

 

I have a similar setup but I run Unraid on a HP microserver with a Plex docker, that's only a old i5. 

 

What's the main purpose of the PC, Plex or browsing?

[Aspman]

Yep, I agree with teh posters above. What you're probably seeing is the cached memory being brought back from the hard disk. In most laptops the hard disk is the major bottleneck. Switching to an SSD you'll probably see a very large increase in performance.

 

If you want a new laptop you don't need an i7. For internet and streaming that can be done on the most basic machines these days.  Although I'm not a big fan of Google something like a Chromebook would likely do what you need for a lot less money in a pleasent package.

[fluffy01016]

Thanks for the advice. I’ve ordered anoth 8gb of memory and gone though all installed programs and uninstalled the ones I don’t use. I’ve also taken of Avast antivirus and will run with Windows 10 own one for now. I though my prinary drive was a ssd but it’s not so might look at that next. 

 

One other quesrion, although I have 4 HDD at the moment I don’t need that much space. Does having More drives slow things down?

 

thanks agai 

[xman]

27 minutes ago, fluffy01016 said:

 

 

One other quesrion, although I have 4 HDD at the moment I don’t need that much space. Does having More drives slow things down?

 

 

 

No. On the contrary, the more the merrier, provided you organise your data wisely.

 

Many a time I see people with extra drives, but all their programs are configured to use the default c drive for data. So the other drives never get used and the poor old c drive is chock a block and overloaded.

 

Note that SSD doesn't suffer from file fragmentation which is the major reasons HDDs slow down over time if they never get optimised. 

 

SSD is the simplest way to boost your system speed dramatically. Before anything including memory expansion.

[Aspman]

It's hard to overstate just how big a difference an SSD can make to an older system. It really is night and day especially if you can go for a clean reinstall at the same time.

 

Even if you just put in a smaller SSD for a boot drive and kept your HD for storage.

 

 

[io1901]

I would as agree with the more disks the better but it can depend on what those disks are. SSD are fast but are still relatively expensive for larger sizes. It also depends on what SATA speeds your motherboard supports. A rebuild will often speed up a system especially if it has had lots of updates ( or be a upgrade from Win 7/ Vista)

 

Is the data on the drives important? You could use the excess as a backup or even configure a simple RAID if you motherboard allows.

 

1 hour ago, xman said: