How slow should this P4 computer be?

[M0RPH]

I'm trying to help a friend who lives in a poor country, can't afford a good PC so they bought a used P4 with the following specs:

P4 506 (prescott) 2.67 Ghz
Asus P5PE-VM motherboard
1 GB DDR Ram
Radeon X1650
40 GB hard drive
Windows XP

Should this thing be ok for light usage? Right now it's painfully slow for them, and I'm trying to determine if there's something wrong or if a P4 is supposed to be this slow. Everything is extremely sluggish on the PC. I did a remote connect with Teamviewer and there isn't much running but CPU usage is always high, even the Teamviewer app was using 50+% CPU.

They also have an netbook with a single-core Atom N280 (1.66 GHz) and say that the P4 desktop is much slower. Should a P4 system be much slower than an Atom? Or do you think there's something wrong with it?

 

[Maximilian]

Nah it should be fine for light usage. I wouldnt expect flawless youtube HD vids from it but its not hopeless.

Could it be overheating? I remember if the P4 overheated it would downclock itself to painfully slow levels, todays CPUs do the same thing but you wont be likely to notice it unless gaming or doing something resource intensive.

Also make sure the graphics drivers are up to date, on first installs when i had XP my CPU would chug when i moved windows around the screen because i hadnt installed any graphics drivers yet.

 

[LoneNinja]

Old hard drives are painfully slow compared to newer ones, that is probably part of the reason the Atom system is faster. May be due for a fresh install of Windows.

I looked at an old P4 computer for someone last year because they complained it was horribly slow, and it was. I couldn't find anything wrong with it, cpu usage was high despite nothing running and no viruses. It may just be that dated, I don't have anything remotely that old to compare performance to anymore.

 

[podspi]

I have a P4 @ 3ghz and an Atom N270 @ 1.6ghz (both 1 core 2 thread), both with 1gb of RAM. This is entirely subjective, but they feel to be about the same speed.

 

[toyota]

I have a P4 @ 3ghz and an Atom N270 @ 1.6ghz (both 1 core 2 thread), both with 1gb of RAM. This is entirely subjective, but they feel to be about the same speed.

I find that hard to believe unless all you do is stare at the desktop.

my fathers P4 (either 3.0 or 3.2 but I forget) with HT absolutely slaughtered my Atom netbook. I was surprised his pc could play youtube HD videos flawlessly and handle normal Flash on sites while those things just killed that poor little Atom. it was a night and day difference for the most part.

 

[Denithor]

Make sure their HDD is operating in DMA mode (not PIO mode). If it drops into PIO mode everything will run exceedingly slow.

 

[sm625]

P4 506 doesnt have hyperthreading. It is gonna choke. Make sure you're not running out of ram and hitting the pagefile.

At any rate, they should pull the cpu and get a conroe/allendale. Being in a poor country doesnt mean they cant upgrade a cpu. Check this list and hopefully you can find a cpu on ebay for $32 that does not require a bios update:

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_775/P5PEVM/#CPUS

Trust me you do not want to try and update the bios on an asus from this era.

Take this one for example:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-E6400...775-/230700974513?pt=CPUs&hash=item35b6d981b1

Then overclock it to 2.8GHz and it will be blazing fast for them.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Our research lab is still using P4 computers. One is 3.0 gz and one is 3.2 or something I believe. One lab even had a 2.8 ghz P4. I did not notice them being painfully slow for internet use and office tasks. They were business class Dells though, so the HDD and cooling and the rest of the components were of good quality. I dont know what kind of CPU usage they were getting though.

So I think the comp you described should be usable for general tasks, and as fast an a single core atom. As someone else suggested, maybe it is overheating. Has he tried cleaning the system to remove dust and dirt? And I still wouldnt rule out some virus or spyware or just a lot of old garbage programs running in the background. Could he do a reformat to see if that speeds things up?

 

[cantholdanymore]

Make sure the computer in clean inside. Imagine 5 years of dust inside

 

[Cerb]

I find that hard to believe unless all you do is stare at the desktop.

my fathers P4 (either 3.0 or 3.2 but I forget) with HT absolutely slaughtered my Atom netbook. I was surprised his pc could play youtube HD videos flawlessly and handle normal Flash on sites while those things just killed that poor little Atom. it was a night and day difference for the most part.

I use both a P4 3.0 HT (Northwood) w/ an Xpress 200, and 1st-gen Atom w/ HT daily. Both suck at dynamic websites, flash, and flash video. The P4 works a bit better for old games (half of that is the Radeon IGP), and does benchmark somewhat faster, but they are far from night and day apart, IME. If the P4 had a decent video card attached, there might be a night and day difference, but with kind of blah IGP, both are in the same league of slowness.

The OP, OTOH, has a slower 533MHz FSB Prescott with no HT, which should be in a dead heat with an Atom. I suspect what makes it feel much slower than the Atom is the HDD, and/or an old Windows install, and/or crapware. Checking for dust is a good idea, too, as mentioned, and also, working fans. A non-functional fan will make a P4 throttle.

After checking the physical condition of the PC inside, and making sure those fans work, I would:

1. Make sure a fairly light AV client is being used, like Avast, Antivir, or MSSE (MSSE can be a RAM hog, sometimes, though), and that nothing remotely like a security suite is on there. Run msconfig, and check out all startup applications, and make sure every one of them is actually useful.

2. Check the HDD manufacturer, get their diag tools, and run them. It will take some time, but it won't hurt, and if the HDD is on its way out, it may fail a long test, even with the machine being stable. This is one of those belt and suspenders things, but I've run across many a dying HDD that caused no obvious instability or corruption. I would hate to replace the HDD today, though.

3. Assuming your friend has the means to back up data from the PC, and has OS media, or a restore partition, and has some other means to transfer data from the web to the PC, maybe try a reinstall. Just to be on the safe side, run the magic jellybean and save off that data, too.

If there is a recovery partition, that would work fine after backing up--just remove crapware afterwards. If OS media, check if there's a driver disc (Dell likes to do it that way), or if the disc is a restore disc. Do your best to make sure the OP has everything needed before trying to reinstall. If the HDD is SATA, make sure it is showing up as a plain old PATA drive.

 

[BrightCandle]

Take a look at this review that contains modern processors and older ones like the Pentium 4 670. http://techreport.com/articles.x/18448

HT on the P4's wasn't worth more than about 10% performance even when the app was suited to it, and it regularly lost performance in other applications so the difference isn't too great from the CPU you have.

 

[zlejedi]

I'm using 3,2 Ghz prescott rig at my office and it's fine for general office usage.

Any HD video, flash on websites , big excel tables kill it. It also tends to have slow downs quite often or will spin rpm into turbojet mode for things that shouldn't load it that much.

 

[Compman55]

That system will still fly if you throw that hard drive away and get a newer one. Somthing with 16MB cache, 7200rpm and at least 160GB or more.

If still using only IDE hard drives, then you will be limited to 8mb cache.

 

[Ratman6161]

P4 506 doesnt have hyperthreading. It is gonna choke. Make sure you're not running out of ram and hitting the pagefile.....

Hyperthreading on P4 desktops sucked big time. In all the reviews of the time there was little to no benefit to it and in some cases it actually hurt performance. Servers of that generation were a different story but on desktop P4's it was worthless.

If this is an old, used system, the biggest improvement to be had in subjective performance is probably:

1. As others have pointed out make sure it is not overheating. pop the cover off the box and clean out the dust. I just use a vacuum cleaner. Its amazing how much dust can build up in a system and a heat sink caked in dust isn't doing its job near as well.

2. Make sure the bios settings are correct.

3. format c:\ and do a fresh install of Windows XP. make sure all drivers are up to date, update windows with sp3 if it wasn't installed during the inital install. Run windows update and fully update everythin.

At this point you will find it to at least feel a whole lot faster.

 

[happy medium]

They also have an netbook with a single-core Atom N280 (1.66 GHz) and say that the P4 desktop is much slower. Should a P4 system be much slower than an Atom? Or do you think there's something wrong with it?

I had a Pent 4 3.06 533 bus (hyperthreading),1gb of memory and a 7200 rpm drive and it was just fine for internet and other normal usage. It also had a 7800gs gpu though. It played games fairly well too.

That system should be just fine for everyday use,something is wrong.

I would check the startup program with msconfig and defrag drive for starters. My system never used any cpu cycles when idle, mabe 2 %.

edit 40gb drive? thats the problem, that thing is probrobly painfully slow crap.

 

[jhu]

What everyone else said. Plus the processor is a 64-bit processor, so send them a 64-bit version of Windows too.

 

[fuzzymath10]

As long as you use XP, you're probably ok. My parents had a P4 1.8A with 1.25GB RAM and a 128MB 6600GT and it was pretty slow with a fresh W7 installation due to high CPU time but fine with XP.

With 1GB ram, don't bother with 64-bit, especially since you won't want to use W7, and XP x64 will be a lot of trouble for no practical gain.

The difference between the original 40GB 7200rpm drive and a newer 250GB 7200rpm drive was not substantial, but I recommend reformatting.

 

[RU482]

a $90 SSD and a $50 video card would feel like a new computer to them.

 

[nenforcer]

I upgraded my Mom's PC from a Pentium 3 1GHz 512MB SDRAM to a P4 3.06GHz w/533 MHz FSB Northwood and Hyperthreading along with 1 GB (256MB x 4) Rambus RDRAM a year ago.

It only has a Geforce 4 MX graphics card but is more than capable of 720P YouTube, etc.

I think you either need to reinstall Windows XP SP 3 or purchase a new hard drive. That 40 GB hard drive must be nearly a decade old, if not older. I think that is your bottleneck.

Not only that but it's not large enough for modern usage.

Fortunately you can still purchase new IDE hard drives but they are getting quite scarce and are not priced competitively, especially after the floods in Thailand.

 

[jhu]

The other question is: does your friend really need Windows? Ubuntu or Mint would be much faster.

 

[M0RPH]

P4 506 doesnt have hyperthreading. It is gonna choke. Make sure you're not running out of ram and hitting the pagefile.

At any rate, they should pull the cpu and get a conroe/allendale. Being in a poor country doesnt mean they cant upgrade a cpu. Check this list and hopefully you can find a cpu on ebay for $32 that does not require a bios update:

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_775/P5PEVM/#CPUS

Trust me you do not want to try and update the bios on an asus from this era.

Take this one for example:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-E6400...775-/230700974513?pt=CPUs&hash=item35b6d981b1

Then overclock it to 2.8GHz and it will be blazing fast for them.

So you're saying that a Core2Duo can be popped into that motherboard to replace a P4? Would the HSF need to be replaced as well?

 

[M0RPH]

Thanks for all the tips, guys. I'll work with my friend and see what we can do about getting the performance up. Maybe get a new hard drive or cpu.

 

[ThatsABigOne]

What everyone else said. Plus the processor is a 64-bit processor, so send them a 64-bit version of Windows too.

None of P4 processors are 64bit.

 

[mrjoltcola]

I'll reiterate what someone said, check for Anti-virus, and consider uninstalling it. Unless he is going to do critical work on it, he's better off not running AV, or at least running a passive AV that scans on-demand rather than everything he does. Just make sure to keep Internet Explorer tight, or use the latest Firefox with security settings on.

When family members have complained about speed, I've usually found it due to something like Norton AV. Some PCs really can't handle some of the AV software out there.

I also have a P4 that is dedicated to remote support for an older customer that uses a VPN that won't work with Windows 7. I could convert this to VMware, but I've been lazy. I notice when I do a screen sharing session on the P4 that CPU jumps to > 50% until the session is over. This is with a fresh image of XP, and 2.5GB RAM on it. That may explain what you saw when using Teamviewer, but doesn't explain why it is dog-slow. My P4 and Athlon 3200 are relatively snappy otherwise.

I also recommend reimaging the system with a fresh install.

 

[sm625]

So you're saying that a Core2Duo can be popped into that motherboard to replace a P4? Would the HSF need to be replaced as well?

Yes, and as long as you check the bios version and get a cpu covered on that bios version, then you wont need to update the bios. You wont need to replace the heatsink. It could be just a simple upgrade. But then it could be hell if the bios needs to be updated. If they have any option of returning it or exchanging it, then they should update the bios immediately and return it if it dies in the process.

note I have a "perfectly good" bricked asus P5-something motherboard that would not take a bios update and it finally bricked after the 3rd different attempt/method. What should have been an easy $32 P4 to c2d upgrade turned out to be a $150 repair and a lot of hassle.