Upgrading my PC?
 

Acer AX3960, Intel i3 2100, 4GB DDR3, 1TB.

What would be the cheapest way to get it to run faster? It presently takes well over ten minutes to boot up before it will do anything:(

And how come CPU's like the i5 and i7 are so expensive to buy when they come n ready built computers for the same price as I will pay just for the processor?

PS: please make any replies technophobe-friendly, I don't do computers very much.
Thanks.

best way alka would be pop an SSd drive in and use the current 1TB drive as the slave or storage area

http://www.cclonline.com/product/167...Basic/SSD0106/

Reason I recommend 512 is you say your not mega technical, so when you do things you may, unknown to you pop them on the Boot drive in this instance your new SSD, and the smaller ones fill up.

This give you some bandwidth to make mistakes

If you feel confident then a smaller one will be cool

http://www.cclonline.com/product/967...Drive/HDD1694/


or if your flush something like this but tweak the config to lower the price a little or ring Chillblast in the UK speak to Ben and tell him your budget and you need an SSD and Large storage

http://www.cclonline.com/product/170.../CCL-EL-RAV4P/

You think it's that I have too much stored? There's not THAT much on it, hardly any music and only about 3000 photos, most at low res for internet use.

The problem very likely isn't how much you've got stored, it's that traditional magnetic spinning drives simply don't have read/write speeds anywhere near as good as the other components in the PC (processor, RAM, graphics card, system bus), so everything else has to sit around waiting for the disk to do its bit. Add to that the fact that on a typical Windows PC with System Restore enabled, disk-indexing and an anti-virus software installed, a lot of data has to be written to or read from the disk 2 or 3 times before it can actually be used by the software that's trying to read or write it, so it's no suprise you end up with the symptoms you've got (along with many other PC users). Switching to an SSD to run the OS from would mean all that reading and writing happens at pretty much the maximum speed that the processor and RAM can run at, and the PC will seem very much faster.

as above alka, the SSD is what makes a PC fast really, much more so than even putting an I7 in and 32gb ram.

I came on holiday where I type this now, and my laptop had 2 320GB drives in a raid, the laptop is a fast 1, core i7 extreme, but slow as hell to boot, Raid 1 doesn't help..

Anyway before I came away I gutted 1 drive and popped in an old 64gb SSD I had and the thing flies now... I mean 10 seconds or less to boot....before im talking 1 or 2 mins before I could move the mouse in any way useful

Why are those drives so dear when I can buy a 1TB external one for £60?

because an SSD has no moving parts its solid state and 5 to 8 times faster than the internal ones, and more so than external

think about switching your Ipad or IPhone on that's kinda like a solid state drive booting.... fast

OK, I get that...but isn't my WD external 1TB drive SSD?

Not for £60

You could try a Hybrid SSHD - http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage/...-&-Dual-Drives

They don't boot as quickly as an SSD, but should do so in about 2 minutes (there are some YouTube videos showing relative boot up times) - I've recently replaced a 320Gb HDD in a laptop with a 1Tb SSHD and also a 1.5Tb HDD in a desktop with a 2Tb SSHD and that has improved my boot times by over 50%.

Do I/would I lose all my stuff, programmes etc?

Littleted, do you just have an internal SSD and the storage drive is your external drive?

No - you clone your existing drive using something like EaseUS Todo Backup or Macrium Reflect which are both free.

You'd need an external enclosure to put the new drive into and then connect via USB to your computer, then clone and once completed replace to old drive. All your programmes and files will remain, although it is worth doing a backup of anything important before running the cloning just to be on the safe side.

Sounds far beyond me I'm afraid.

I have an AX3960 too.

Just dropped in another 4gb of Ram which does seem to have made it a little quicker.

I am wondering about getting an SSD though.

If you can follow reasonably straightforward step-by-step instructions, it shouldn't be beyond you to clone everything on your existing hard-disk to a new SSD or hybrid -SSD. The process might seem a little daunting if it's your first time though, and it's definitely not without risk (of losing all your stuff), if you do it wrong. A competent professional shouldn't charge much more than an hour's labour for the job though (the actual copying will very likely take longer, but most of that time it'll just be buzzing away in the background with no human input required ).

I'll ask locally...and/or contact a lad I know who works for the LEA as an IT technician in schools.

SSD as ur boot drive would make a world of difference, if you have space internal for another drive then your existing drive could work as the storage drive. failing that you could put the 1tb into a usb3 enclosure and have it external. Pretty much everything could be on the storage drive so the size of the ssd doesnt have to be massive. i use a 256gb ssd as my boot drive and have a few programs installed that i use a lot, other stuff like photos and not so important crap is on normal spinnie drives. it flies through anything and boots up in 15 seconds from power on.

Hi there

As above guys suggest you I would go route of SSD,its worth to use SSD as main boot HDD,depends on size and makers,but good is Crucial MX100 512GB which doesn't cost too much and they're pretty reliable and second choice is go with Samsung 840 Pro/EVO,I've got both in my PC and 840 is bit faster and MX100 is bit slower

Price wise: MX100 512GB SSD around £120 over on eBay(in shops around £150)
Samsung 840 cost bit more

But as second disc for backups etc I would use normal HDD,I've got 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 and is pretty fast,much faster than my WD Green,Blue or Black which I've got too in my PC

And about the how to transfer yours existing Windows on new SSD,its very easy,please have look on this

http://www.howtogeek.com/57442/how-t...th-clonezilla/

I would recommend to unplug older HDD where has been Windows previously for time being

With SSD yours boot times should go down as stone and dramatically,upgrading CPU o yours is not worth it,rather I would start with SSD and RAM there

Hope this helps

Thanks,Jura

Thanks for all the replies and help.

I'm over in France in two weeks for two months, so the upgrade will be on hold. Over there I have a new-ish laptop running 8.1 with hardly any programmes on it, and it boots up almost instantly.

I don't use external at all, my laptop has two drive bays it's a massive dell precision workstation, so I use one ssd and one spinner and it's fine..

It's basically same as what we all do here always have two drives in your desktop one SSD and the rest old school spinners like a few 3 TB drives as your D and E drive, use d and e for all your music films etc... Pop your best games on C or the SSD for fast loading....

The option of the Hybrid drive if you only have one bay is good the western digital black version is 160 quid it combines a 128 Gig ssd with a 1 tb spinner in one unit.

It's basically what Apple call a fusion drive, I have a 3tb version in my retina IMac...

If you pc takes 10min to boot, then your operating system and it's registry are shagged beyond belief. Bloatware spyware malware and installing tonnes of crap in the past even if you've since uninstalled it is usually the cause

Seriously?
What can I do then? Owt, or nowt?

And as for A,B,C,D,E drives, I've never yet been asked where I want to put anything I download, the computer just does it...often hiding the b@stard stuff beyond reasonable searches.......:mad:

Not necessarily. This can quite easily happen on a PC with the usual mix of completely legitimate software. Aside from the reasons for slowness already mentioned, if you also factor in at boot-time in particular all the installed software checking for updates and/or trying to install them (something which modern software has become horridly aggressive in doing), Windows doing the same thing and indexing the drive, plus all the startup programs which insist on running in the background as soon as a PC is switched on (another completely unnecessary but insidious tendency of far too much modern software) and you're not going to be far off the symptoms the OP describes. You could well be right that there's some malware adding to the problem, but in my experience it might only be playing a very small part.

I'd opt for adding an SSD and going dual boot, so you can boot into the old o/s, and alternatively into a freshly installed one. As Mark has said being selective and taking a considered approach when installing software and then tweaking the settings to suit would be a good move.

Most browsers have a common default download folder, which browser do you use?

Firefox, I.E. Chrome etc

Hi there

I would give try CCleaner at least and I would check startup programs too or just post the screenshot of yours start up programs,but 10mins is too much and yes 8.1 is much faster than W7

And external HDD too I don't use,I've too 3TB Toshiba plus few other normal HDD,but second SSD is used as dual boot for hackkintosh project and as my scratch disc for Photoshop and few other programs

Hope this helps

Thanks,Jura

I don't know how many cores are in an i3 , but there is a free utility by Intel

Intel Extreme Tuning utility

It will give your CPU a speed increase of 8-10%

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/...g-utility.html

Firefox. Yep, there's a download folder, but stuff sometimes disappears, and takes me an age to find.

It's a quad core, afaik, and thanks, running that now and have bookmarked it for my laptop.

It's dual core.

Intel Core i3 2100
Cores 2
Threads 4
Name Intel Core i3 2100
Code Name Sandy Bridge
Package Socket 1155 LGA
Technology 32nm
Specification Intel Core i3-2100 CPU @ 3.10GHz