Well, reinstalled Vista with new hardware.

[fuzzybabybunny]

Vista operation was unacceptable with my old hardware. You guys might remember my old thread here.

I decided to throw money at the problem and upgrade my hardware.

Old: Pentium D 805, Asus P5ND2, Audigy 2
New: Q6600, Gigabyte P35 DS3R, X-Fi Xtreme Gamer

Common: 7900GT, 8GB RAM, hard drives

Wow, Vista is all of a sudden snappy and stable now. Upon reinstall I IMMEDIATELY disabled all scheduled tasks that could possibly make my HDD go crazy. UAC is still on, but all of Vista's built-in security features like firewall and malware protection are disabled and replaced with real security software. Automatic updates are completely turned off.

1. explorer.exe no longer uses 100% of my CPU for no reason
2. Sync center and anything WMDC related is still a piece of shit.
3. explorer folder settings work now
4. no more random 100% HDD usage
5. sleep still doesn't work with Firefox, sometimes computer doesn't come out of sleep properly - powers up but powers down at the last second, and this starts to cycle
6. Vista actually shuts down now
7. X-Fi driver is fine
8. USB connectivity with PDA phone is still stupid as hell. Connected! Disconnected. Connected! Disconnected. etc. when the phone is plugged in.

The Q6600 absolutely eats through processing jobs and it's a joy to work with. Everything feels quite snappy and I can definitely feel Superfetch working. Now I just wish the HDD wouldn't be such a bottleneck. When are we going to get single storage units that can actually make even SATA150 speeds?

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: fuzzybabybunny
When are we going to get single storage units that can actually make even SATA150 speeds?

When they stick a SATA interface onto a Seagate Cheetah 15k.6, perhaps :evil: What would they call that... a Cheetacuda? Barracheetah?

The Cheetah 15K.6 lowers idle and
operational power requirements from its prior generation ? as much as 61% in watts/GB ? while increasing overall sustained data transfer rates by 28% at 164MB/sec.

Congrats on the upgrade, wish I could do that myself. BTW although the language filters are relaxed, the general directive as I last heard it was, try to steer clear of profanity in the tech sections of the Forums. For the s-word and f-word, that's what we have Politics & News for :evil:

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

Originally posted by: fuzzybabybunny
When are we going to get single storage units that can actually make even SATA150 speeds?

When they stick a SATA interface onto a Seagate Cheetah 15k.6, perhaps :evil: What would they call that... a Cheetacuda? Barracheetah?

The Cheetah 15K.6 lowers idle and
operational power requirements from its prior generation ? as much as 61% in watts/GB ? while increasing overall sustained data transfer rates by 28% at 164MB/sec.

Congrats on the upgrade, wish I could do that myself. BTW although the language filters are relaxed, the general directive as I last heard it was, try to steer clear of profanity in the tech sections of the Forums. For the s-word and f-word, that's what we have Politics & News for :evil:

I was thinking more along the lines of solid state disks. Not exactly a direct replacement, but I remember Gigabyte did a RAM Disk type thing back in the day. AT reviewed it, and said it would be wise for them to go to SATA300 instead of the SATA150 that it was using. Unfortunately, Gigabyte hasn't updated the design of its RAM Disk.

I remember seeing a video of the thing loading Windows XP. You know that screen with the XP logo and the progress bar? It just flashed on the screen for about half a second and BOOM you were at your desktop.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Originally posted by: fuzzybabybunny

Originally posted by: mechBgon

Originally posted by: fuzzybabybunny
When are we going to get single storage units that can actually make even SATA150 speeds?

When they stick a SATA interface onto a Seagate Cheetah 15k.6, perhaps :evil: What would they call that... a Cheetacuda? Barracheetah?

The Cheetah 15K.6 lowers idle and
operational power requirements from its prior generation ? as much as 61% in watts/GB ? while increasing overall sustained data transfer rates by 28% at 164MB/sec.

Congrats on the upgrade, wish I could do that myself. BTW although the language filters are relaxed, the general directive as I last heard it was, try to steer clear of profanity in the tech sections of the Forums. For the s-word and f-word, that's what we have Politics & News for :evil:

I was thinking more along the lines of solid state disks. Not exactly a direct replacement, but I remember Gigabyte did a RAM Disk type thing back in the day. AT reviewed it, and said it would be wise for them to go to SATA300 instead of the SATA150 that it was using. Unfortunately, Gigabyte hasn't updated the design of its RAM Disk.

I remember seeing a video of the thing loading Windows XP. You know that screen with the XP logo and the progress bar? It just flashed on the screen for about half a second and BOOM you were at your desktop.

It still performed well even if it was SATA150. But it's limited to 4gb, and uses ddr which is more expensive than ddr2.

 

[foghorn67]

We are motherboard twins. :heart: