Rebooting my computer @ work...

[OCGuy]

Is like starting a car with a crank on the front. I could go microwave a burrito in the break room and come back and XP wont be loaded yet.


I seriously dont know how you guys with P4s or the AMD equivalent get by, but my hat is off to you.

/rant

 

[AmberClad]

I feel your pain. My work computer is a laptop with a 2.0Ghz Core Duo, 2 gigs of RAM, and Intel GMA 950 .

I avoid rebooting whenever possible. It's less painful just to put it into standby when I'm not using it.

 

[Idontcare]

What do you guys consider to be painfully long reboots?

My 6yr old dell laptop that I still use daily for much of my websurfing packs a puny 800MHz P3, 640MB ram, and some OLD integrated intel graphics (830? 815?) and I have XP Pro w/SP3 loaded and the boot time might be 30-40seconds.

Maybe you guys have a ton of app stuff that loads when XP loads? I haven't done anything intentional with my XP install to speed it up. I never considered the boot time of 30-40s to be problematic.

 

[AmberClad]

Well in my case, not so much the time to boot itself, but it's just not very responsive for a while once it gets to the desktop. Actually, it's just slow and unresponsive in general really, especially in terms of I/O responsiveness.

 

[Idontcare]

Yeah, true that. I do minimal amount of activity on my laptop. Even websurfing is painful compared to my desktop.

 

[Drsignguy]

What's really bad is when you go to a family members house and boot their computer. Let's see each parent and 3 daughters with everything under the sun in it....Oh and "by the way", since your here, could you fix it, somethings wrong? Oh my, what have I gotten myself into?:Q

 

[krnmastersgt]

My 2.66ghz P4 system boots in like 30 seconds tops, lot less drivers/programs on the boot than my Q6600 system so it's actually faster for me

 

[Martimus]

Mine takes about 10-15 minutes to load everything up, so when I get in I turn on the computer go and get some water, come back, log-in, and find something else to do for ten minutes while all the programs load up.

That isn't that big of a deal though, it is the e-mail going down for hours at a time that gets annoying.

 

[vj8usa]

My old 1.4GHz AthlonXP system with 512MB RAM boots up lightning quick (30 seconds or less). To be fair, it has virtually no startup applications, but it feels weird to know that it boots up in half the time my main rig does.

 

[Nvidiaguy07]

systems like that either need alot more memory or the bare minimum of apps. my friends got an old dell that i constantly fix and its fine until he starts putting all crap on it. 5 different poker programs, hp software, kodak crap, toolbars, ugh............

 

[myocardia]

That's crazy. I've never owned a computer that took more than 30 seconds to boot XP, and that includes my websurfing machine, which uses XP Pro with a 1.2 Ghz Celeron-M. Even it's completely ready to use 45 or 50 seconds after I hit the start button, and it runs the same anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, etc that the more powerful systems use.

 

[v8envy]

That's nothing. One fortune 500 company I was consulting at in 2006 had standardized on Dell 500 mhz P3s with win2k. For support contract reasons everyone got one, even as a new hire in 2006. Developers, secretaries, executives, janitors...

Let's just say doing J2EE work using modern, commercial app server on a 500 mhz P3 is painful to an unimaginable extreme. Tasks which would otherwise take minutes took hours. Tests which should have run in an hour took a full day. The amount of money thrown away paying a sizable number of developers to surf the net 80% of the workday while their machines slowly boiled along was staggering.

Glad I mostly got to watch the suffering.

 

[Cheesetogo]

I don't really think it necessarily has much to do with your computer being a P4 as much as the software that's running on it. My old high school had mostly P4s, and from turn on to the login screen it was only about 15-20 seconds, and then maybe 10 seconds after logging in.

 

[Mark R]

Heh. Our machines at work are hilarious.

They're dual quad-core xeons, with 15k rpm SCSI raid (a bit of a waste as all they run is thin client stuff and net streamed stuff, but that aside...). They take ages to boot - the SCSI susbsytem takes about 1 minute to go though it's POST. The it boots XP, which is very fast - until you actually have to log in.

Then comes all the crap loaded on - Antivirus, other security stuff, PC anywhere, various diagnostics, Ghost, all the various driver toolbar/hotkey things. Then finally, you can load the actual software. The main software is java, and that takes an absurd amount of time to start. No idea what it does, because CPU usage and HD activity are at zero while it does it.

This would all be fine, if the system actually worked properly - but it doesn't. The software, or one of its supporting drivers/services, crashes with incredible frequency - typically about once an hour, and if it's a service that goes, it's power off time (which usually has to be done manually, because the hung service will block a clean shutdown indefinitely).

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: v8envy
That's nothing. One fortune 500 company I was consulting at in 2006 had standardized on Dell 500 mhz P3s with win2k. For support contract reasons everyone got one, even as a new hire in 2006. Developers, secretaries, executives, janitors...

Let's just say doing J2EE work using modern, commercial app server on a 500 mhz P3 is painful to an unimaginable extreme. Tasks which would otherwise take minutes took hours. Tests which should have run in an hour took a full day. The amount of money thrown away paying a sizable number of developers to surf the net 80% of the workday while their machines slowly boiled along was staggering.

Glad I mostly got to watch the suffering.

Ha ha, reminds me of an early co-op stint I did where as the summer intern I got a fancy pentium 133 desktop. Unbeknownst to me this raised much ire in my officemates, the new guy getting the best while they still had 4yr old boxes.

So they complained, and the solution was, I kid you not, to move my P133 desktop computer to an empty cubicle (not even given to an existing employee) where it ran a screensaver 24x7 the entire summer while I was given a 386 computer to use for the duration of my summer job.

That 386 was so slow I literally had a 2-3 second pause everytime I move one cell in Excel (which I used for ~60% of my job functions at the time). I got paid by the hour and had no problem whatsoever working 14-16hrs a day to do maybe 2hrs of work. I love big business, that summer employer was Texas Instruments (naturally). My subsequent experiences with them never really detered from that central theme I experienced that fateful summer.

If I had to use a 500MHz P3 today for anything work related I would seriously develop a Wally persona. How can anyone standardize on computer performance, what a way to cripple your entire business productivity relative to your competition.

 

[faxon]

im currently sitting at a rig with 1gb of DDR333 and an athlonXP 2600+, and it has an IDE hard drive. thing boots XP SP3 in under 30 seconds to a desktop that is immediately usable. my 2.8GHz (northwood) pentium 4 rig booted faster (SMT FTW) before i sold it lol. you guys really should cut down on the start up apps, or get yourself a faster hard drive

 

[Erock]

I actually like p4's. I have a presshot 2.8 in a desktop at home that would run hotter than hell but never quit on me. still works to this day! boot time is about 20 seconds because I disabled all programs on startup. ran counterstrike source with 60fps

 

[roid450]

my cousins P4 2.6 with 5200rpm ide drive loads in about 40 seconds to a desktop.

what i have now boots up in 17 seconds as i timed it last time. from push of the power button-to desktop

 

[evident]

my work laptop takes about 10 minutes to load. It's all the crap software they load on this machine. I have a fast C2D too!

 

[SolMiester]

Originally posted by: Drsignguy
What's really bad is when you go to a family members house and boot their computer. Let's see each parent and 3 daughters with everything under the sun in it....Oh and "by the way", since your here, could you fix it, somethings wrong? Oh my, what have I gotten myself into?:Q

+1 LMAO

Actually, I am seriously considering ditching the SCSI Raid....by the time it has initiaised for SCSI raid, SATA & IDE raid controllers, its like 3min for my home PC....all good once started, however you will understand why I dont clock to bleeding edge....i couldnt stand the stability testing...!!

 

[Dadofamunky]

Originally posted by: Ocguy31
Is like starting a car with a crank on the front. I could go microwave a burrito in the break room and come back and XP wont be loaded yet.


I seriously dont know how you guys with P4s or the AMD equivalent get by, but my hat is off to you.

/rant

LOL. I have exactly the same issues, because I have a junk NetBurst 2.8 GHz box at work. I can't get my peeps to cut loose with a new CPU for me (at least not for awhile), so I'm picking through the junk pile. I'm trying to bring up an Athlon X2 3800+ system that I purloined from an empty cube of a laid-off employee and have to swap out the HSF piece of junk for something much more substantial. It's actually a pretty decent machine, built by Monarch Computers back when they actually made good machines, with a really stupid HSF as the big build flaw. It uses great OCZ Platinum DDR-400 RAM (the same EXACT stuff I have in my X2), and an Asus NForce4 mobo. I should be able to OC it to 2.6 GHz or so, which would make it, oh, 3x faster than the junker I'm running at work now. When I'm done, this will be by far the fastest desktop anyone has in the company. Ridiculous!

 

[BoboKatt]

Our P4 desktops at work take forever to boot up as well but that's cause of all the policy crap and scripts they have running at boot up. By the time I can actually log on, i've grown the beard I shaved before leaving home in the morning.

If I check the applications running in the background, I get cramps in my fingers as I scroll with the mouse down the list.

 

[badnewcastle]

LOL @ this thread! I'm the IT trainer for my sales office, there are 18 people here besides me and more then half type with 2 fingers only and they complain about the computers being slow.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Originally posted by: badnewcastle
LOL @ this thread! I'm the IT trainer for my sales office, there are 18 people here besides me and more then half type with 2 fingers only and they complain about the computers being slow.

Yeah, but you work in a SALES office! Not as if you support any INTELLIGENT beings!

I just rescued an Athlon X2 3800+ box from the boneyard. Woo hoo! On first attempt, set the HT multi to 4x, cranked the FSB to 250Mhz, and it just booted Linux flawlessly.

Strange, at first I still had the memclock index set to 400Mhz and it still ran! I did get some boot warning messages, but it still ran.

Set to 333Mhz now. It boots with no warnings at all.

Also able to set the memory to 1T timings, which definitely helps with this type of CPU. Awesome!

It's now running at 2.5 GHz, which being that it has 2x512K cache pretty much makes it a 4800+ equivalent. I would strongly suspect this blows my old laboring NetBurst machine out of the water. The CPU voltage is set to 1.5V, and the idle temps show 46C in the BIOS. I'm turning the vcore down a bit.

This thing will be my NetBurst replacement. Wish I could get a Dell Core 2 Quad, but oh well...

I'm overjoyed. I think I have my next work computer! Now all I have to do is transfer my Windows installation. That should be TONS of fun. Now to download the Nforce driver set for the Asus motherboard...

 

[Scotteq]

(Not Particularly) Proud booter of a plain jane 2 Ghz P4 with a *massive* 512 MB of RAM for my work computer. Tried to install a memory upgrade for the thing..... Paid 5x what it was worth for the exact same part number as the one in there.

Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep

*sigh*

I've actually considered loosening the HSF on the thing and letting it burn up. But the result would be a Toaster instead of an actual PC...

You know it's bad when you're thinking about your next build and point of consideration is that you could put your old processor and components on an integrated board and bring it to work.... /wrists