PC Speed Between WinXP & Win7

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ultramel1987

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I am currently running Pentium4 Windows 7 Ultimate
BIOSTAR G31 board
3GIG Ram
80GIG HD for C Drive
500GIG additional storage

My pc is running so slow, and I am in the process of getting pricing for new board, processor and RAM - and I just have a few questions...

1. In the meantime before upgrade - will my pc be faster if I install XP instead of Win7?
2. Is there a huge difference between I3 and I5 (dont play any fancy 3d games, just run a lot of programs simultaneously, such as Flash, Photoshop, and web design software....)
3. Any suggestions on the most affordable places to purchase processor and board, etc

Thank you
 
xp would probably feel faster, as it uses less resources.

i3 would be fine , or i5 2300 they really cheap these days.

try to a get better C drive 80gb is bit slow and old by now, and a pc can only work as fast your drive can work, a nice 320gb samsung 7200 rpm or something in that line.
 
Xp will feel slower and slower as the months go by, get windows 7 dude or reload windows xp fresh. If you are getting a new cpu go windows 7 for sure.
 
P4 is ancient no wonder Win 7 feels slow.

XP will feel faster on the first boot after format but after that its all downhill. Windows 7 is fast and doesn't lose its speed, stable to.

If you don't upgrade too often go for the i5, a new hard drive will speed things up as well.
 
thank you to all for your replies.
I formatted the entire drive (c obviously) last night, and did a fresh install of Win7. because my c drive was partitioned, and only 40GIG was allocated to C, and the rest to d) now my c drive is +- 74GIG. thought it would make a difference, but not.

so there will be a noticeable difference between I3 and I5? found an I5 for R1880. is that a good price?


In the meantime, will it help to make my 500GIG my C drive?
and also from what I've read above, don't think it will be worthwhile to install XP again. and i have got so used to Win7 - i love it.

will 2GIG ram be sufficient with the I5
 
Just keep in mind there are different flava i5 CPU's floating around, a S1155 and S1156 so be careful when you buy that you get the mobo right too.
 
I'd go with 4gig's. Windows 7 can easily use a gig while doing nothing. 2gigs won't leave much room if you want to run anything else that's a bit memory intensive. Changing you C:\ drive to the 500gig will make a small improvement. Nothing to call the neighbours over for.
 
thank you again for the replies.

not going to bother changing hard drives now if not going to make a big difference. Going to go straight for the upgrade...
So, going from P4 to I5 going to be something to "call the neighbours" over? :-)

total upgrade of (mobo, cpu, ram) going to cost around R2900.00.. worth it?

could I maybe get better pricing , or is this a good price?
 
hi again. i installed the program provided in the link above, and am busy scanning, etc
what I have found is that the program shows my CPU USAGE AT 100%?
that cannot be right, surely?
 
I have another suggestion: just upgrade your CPU. The G31 motherboard accepts dual core CPU's. Get an E3400 CPU for like R400 and it'll be twice as fast as a P4. You can get some 2tb hard drives too -they're so cheap! Slowness can be caused by a failing or overly full hard disk.

As for your other question, yes scanning programs can use 100% CPU, but they shouldn't do so forever!
 
thank you very much. maybe that is a good idea. how about quad core? big difference? can my board take it?
have now closed scanning (which fixed 240 registry errors). all other programs closed, CPU running at average of 10%...but as soon as I open any program, such as Xara web designer - it jumps to 100% and then almost freezes? it was not like this before the reload last night, it was slow, but manageable. now i think all it will manage is solitaire!!!!
 
It might be worth mentioning that some Adobe products can use nVidia graphics cards for better performance, it might give you a decent performance gain without adding to much to the price.
 
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