where is my bottleneck at

[T2urtle]

i have a dell mini 9. one of the earlier versions of it.

1.6ghz atom
2gb Gskill
32gb runcore SSD
running a slimmed down version of XP pro SP1

I dont use this much, mainly because its just slow. General purpose stuff mainly, it just seems to be slower then anything. I mainly use it to run homework websites and typing out word/excel docs. Watching mpegs and listening to mp3's

Is there freeware that i can run to see my parts are an issue or is it just suppose to be this slow. You think upgrading to win 7 is worth it or maybe look into making this a hacktonish.

I know netbooks are turds compared to any normal deskstop but this is ONE HUGE turd.

 

[fralexandr]

your bottleneck is almost certainly the CPU
the ATOM single core is clock for clock about ~2/3 the speed of a pentium M
i'd expect it to feel like a lowish clocked P4
also i think, though i'm not sure, ATOM has to run sequential, which has an impact on some usage scenarios
multitasking will slow it down
win 7 will probably run slower than XP

xp has a control panel which tells CPU load and memory utilization
xp also comes with a performance monitor that can monitor HDD/SSD usage

 

[lehtv]

The only way you'll see any significant improvement is by switching to a laptop (you can get some 12 inchers with a core i3)

 

[fuzzymath10]

I have a mini 9 with the original SSD and I actually find it acceptable for typical use. Browsing can be sluggish on busier pages, and HD material is generally out of the question. For working on documents or even spreadsheets and some browsing, I actually like it very much.

I would take an atom with an SSD over a low-end notebook with a hard drive. Most of the time people are hard drive bottlenecked and only with a netbook do you begin to observe CPU limitations.