How to make a T41 faster?

[rush242]

Does anyone know WHY no one is making 7200 IDE drives anymore? Any stories, links, anything? I just recently replaced an 80gig with a 160gig and couldn't find a 7200 to save my soul. Any ideas?

[qviri]

Too small of a market. Most of enthusiasts, which are most likely to buy a 7200 rpm drive at a premium price, will have moved to a laptop which takes SATA drives by now.

[msidd]

Ram Ram Ram and more Ram. Buy another stick of 1GB that identical to one you just bought, I would suggest IBM branded ram.

Also a 2MB L2 cache CPU will really help.

Also I would back up whatever that is important and start fresh with a new install of Windows XP Pro.

Try to get rid of unnecessary background services.

[rush242]

Too small of a market. Most of enthusiasts, which are most likely to buy a 7200 rpm drive at a premium price, will have moved to a laptop which takes SATA drives by now.

Gracias, that makes sense, and is sort of what I expected. I just didn't come across much in searching. Well, to be clear, I came across WAY too much.

D'oh!

[awolfe63]

Ram Ram Ram and more Ram. Buy another stick of 1GB that identical to one you just bought, I would suggest IBM branded ram.

Also a 2MB L2 cache CPU will really help.

Also I would back up whatever that is important and start fresh with a new install of Windows XP Pro.

Try to get rid of unnecessary background services.

I don't think a 2mb cache CPU (Dothan) will make a big difference unless it is also substantially faster. It is hard to find direct benchmarks (here is one http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/cpu/ ... than-4.htm) but the difference is only about 3-5% at the same clock speed. You can't see that. If you are going from 1.3GHz to 1.8 or 2.0GHz - that will at least be noticeable.

The RAM question is also tricky. With XP - anything under 1GB is a disaster. I can't find much difference from 1.25 or 1.5GB up to 4GB for the kind of stuff I do (large documents/programs but not Photoshop or CAD). Is it worth adding something to 1GB - close call but since it is under $50 to do it - probably worth a try.

Reinstalling XP. A huge pain - but in my experience makes a huge difference.

[electrizer]

Anyone wants to exchange my two T41 265 MB RAM modules for one 512 MB stick?

[Likvid]

Moving to Dothan 2.1GHz makes a huge difference i can tell you.

I had a plain 1.7GHz Banias before upgrading.

[awolfe63]

I went from a 1.7GHz Dothan (735) to a 2.1GHz (765). (same T42) It was noticable - but not a dramatic difference. Both of them are at 600MHz most of the time. At full speed - I got about a 16-20% improvement on real programs. That's about the minimum noticeable speedup - not a dramatic speedup. I later switched to a machine with a 755 (2.0GHz) which is indistinguishable from the 765 in any normal use.

In the corporate IT space, the general rule of thumb is that upgrades are not worth it unless the new machine is twice as fast. Any less than that and the benefit to users is not enough to make a difference in their productivity. Being spoiled - I am generally willing to make a transition to a new machine for 50% increase in performance. The people who tell you that a bigger cache or a 10-15% impact in clock speed is a big difference are obsessed with benchmark numbers rather than any real work. Even if you are a hard-core gamer (which would be a weird use for a T4x), the difference between 30 and 35fps is barely detectable.