I am wondering if upgarding my Toshiab HDD 60 Gig 4200 rpm will increase load times? Loading Outlook, other apps and even retrieving emails (from multiple accounts) is really slow. HDD is chruning like crazy sometimes during these operations, even at boot up.

I am wondering if it is worth it to get a 80 Gig Samsung 5400 rpm drive. Will this be worth it?

Current system is Toshiba P30:
P4 3.0Ghz
1 Gig Ram
60 Gig HDD 4200 rpm
128 ATI dedicated card

Any tips and hints would be greatly appreciated.

Yes, it will be worth it (at a good price). The difference is definitely noticeable between 4200 and 5400 rpms (not so much between 5400 and 7200 rpms).

One way to stop churning like this is to simply defrag the drive. That should speed it up, esp. if you haven't done it for a while.

Regards,

zakaluka2.

Yes, I have defragged it recently. After a few bootups, it is churning again during certain activities, in particular, outloook and boot up. There is about 50% free space on there but I think it's just the bottle neck in my system. Any more thoughts?

Turn off any AV software you have running. If you are careful with how you use the computer, just having it perform a system scan once a day is good enough to keep it safe.

Regards,

zakaluka2.

Thanks for the tip zakaluka2. hmm, never thought of turning off Antivirus but as this is a business machine, I would feel much better if it was on. Good thought though.

I don't know how much control you have over this machine, but here is a trick I use on my more essential computers.

I use Avira Antivir on computer that I want protected 24/7. One benefit is that Antivir lets you select when a scan is performed on a file. For most AV software, this is done while reading and writing the file. Well, 95% of files accessed are the same ones over and over again. Continuously scanning them on read and write is pointless.

My procedure for those important computers is:

1. Run a full, thorough system scan with Antivir. This ensures (with a large degree of confidence) that the system is clean.
2. Set Antivir on all such computers to only scan files on writes. This makes a HUGE difference. Most of the common system files accessed by programs are for reads only, and we know they are clean from the scan done earlier.
3. Set Antivir to do a full system scan every night, just in case something snuck in.

This sped up all my systems while keeping security at a very high level. Just something to think about, in case you can actually control what AV runs on your machine.

Regards,

zakaluka2.

hmm, very interesting. I will have to try that. My Norton just expired, maybe it's time to try one of those bigger free antivirus programs.

Good insight, thanks.