I just fired up my laptop to say...

[ColinJ]

It's 10 years old !!!!! USB booting is slightly more recent.

Oh well, I've lived without it for nearly 10 years so another year won't hurt...

 

[ColinJ]

The tower is running reliably now. I've decided that I won't update the BIOS, just-in-case.

Booting windows doesn't seem to be noticeably quicker with the extra 512 MB of RAM, but switching between multiple programs definitely is. That's good news.

The bad news is that the PC definitely seems to be too slow to work with my HD videos and I reckon that its old 1.1 GHz Athlon processor is the problem. My laptop has a 1.2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor and it displays the HD video clips with no jerkiness or freezing. That's not really a problem - it means that the laptop has something else to do to justify its existence.

 

[ian turner]

1.1 does not compare directly with the 1.2 of the duo.
A 1.1 is so old it was never going to run HD videos.
The extra memory will increase the speed of program switching as they are now resident in memory rather than paging from the harddrive.
To speed up boot up you'll have to do another clean install as 3-4 years is easily enough time for boot up to slow down due to various updates.

 

[ColinJ]

1.1 does not compare directly with the 1.2 of the duo.
A 1.1 is so old it was never going to run HD videos.

As is now clear!

The extra memory will increase the speed of program switching as they are now resident in memory rather than paging from the harddrive.

Yes, I know how it works. It is now much nicer running more than one application at once. Two used to be just about okay, but three or more could be a pain. Now I'm often just minimising applications rather than shutting them down completely.

To speed up boot up you'll have to do another clean install as 3-4 years is easily enough time for boot up to slow down due to various updates.

Well, that clean install would be years out of date so those updates would all get loaded up again as soon as I connected to the internet. But yes, there's probably all sorts of orphaned crap piled up in the Registry which it would be nice to clear out. To be honest though - the computer stays on all day so it only has to boot once. It doesn't really matter if that takes a couple of minutes instead of one.

Anyway, despite all of the fuss trying to speed up the tower PC, now that I've discovered how much faster the laptop is, I think I'll start using that as my main PC with the monitor, mouse and keyboard pinched from the tower system! It has more RAM (2 GB) than the tower and is quiet so I can record in the room without my mic picking up computer noise.

I think I'll partition the tower's hard drive and make it dual-bootable. Partition 1 can be a backup Windows system in case of problems with the laptop. Partition 2 can eventually be my Play-With-Linux system but I'd need to buy another monitor, keyboard and mouse for that.

 

[ian turner]

Make sure you pick the right Linux version (I refuse to use the D word as it sounds like some sort of foreign restaurant ) as a bog standard Ubuntu installation won't like something quite that old as various owners of antiquated laptops replacing their 98 installation have found out.

 

[ColinJ]

Make sure you pick the right Linux version (I refuse to use the D word as it sounds like some sort of foreign restaurant ) as a bog standard Ubuntu installation won't like something quite that old as various owners of antiquated laptops replacing their 98 installation have found out.

I have two priorities at the moment: (1) Earn more money (2) Ride my bikes more for fun and fitness.

Playing with Linux is something I'll do in the future. The trouble is, I'm easily distracted. I know I'll find it interesting and I'm quite capable of spending a whole day doing something fun when I should be doing something profitable. You only have to look at some of my lengthy posts on CycleChat to see that. Oops, this thread itself is an example!