Not Much Performace Gain With New Core I7 Laptop... Any Culprit ?

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

A few days back, I changed the thing I hold dearest to me () i.e. my laptop. It was HP Pavilion DV6, with AMD athlon triple core processor, 4gigs of ram and lots of other useful stuff. The new laptop I got my hands on is a Dell inspiron 7520 with Intel core i7 3612QM processor, 8 gigs of ram and other improvements. There was no particular reason for a change but there appeared an opportunity for an upgrade and I said why not...

 

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much of a boost in normal activities like windows booting, browsing, office stuff etc. The reason is that both of these laptops are using 5400 rpm hard drives. So all the stuff that depends on reading and writing of the hard drive won't logically see much improvement.

 

However there should have been some improvement. The theory behind this demand of at least some improvement is that although reading and writing to the hard drive would be done at the same speed, processing of data after reading and before writing should have been faster and should have shown some performance improvement. The status is that windows booting takes exactly the same amount of time as before. The time required for opening applications is also similar. And the worse part is that even Firefox takes the same amount of time in becoming functional after double clicking on the icon.

 

So the question in my mind is that why am I not seeing any improvement? Or Am I justified in expecting at least some improvement?

 

Another question in my mind right now is that how much improvement I am going to see if I change my current hard drive to a SSD. There have been some active discussions on this forum about HDDs vs SSDs. One point that I remember from those discussions is that if you have a machine that has great hardware but includes a 5400 rpm HDD, the performance of the machine will be bottlenecked by the HDD.

 

So is the performance of my machine being bottlenecked by the HDD?

[OpaQue 15]

So is the performance of my machine being bottlenecked by the HDD? --> Yes, I m damn sure!

[yordan 10]

If your machines are Linux ones, you should probably perform a nmon analysis and see where system time is expended : user cpu, kernel cpu, waiting for disks or waiting for the network

[manuleka 0]

i use to have a 3.5" 5400 rpm hard drive on my PC and i can honestly see noticeable difference when swapping it with a 7200 rpm drive...

 

best way for your laptop is to add/swap with a SSD drive... I have a hybrid drive (semi SSD) and there's a little boost in speed compared to my standard 7200 rpm drive (of the same capacity)

[yordan 10]

You definitely have to check where your system spends time. If most of the time is spent on disk I/O, you have to switch to a faster disk, or add a second disk.

If most of the time is cpu time, you have to switch to a faster cpu.

Too bad there is no company giving you a disk for a limited time test, this kind of try-and-buy service would be profitable to each one.

[Ahsaniqbalkmc 0]

So is the performance of my machine being bottlenecked by the HDD? --> Yes, I m damn sure!

So I think I will have to spend some extra money to get the most out of my machine..

 

If your machines are Linux ones, you should probably perform a nmon analysis and see where system time is expended : user cpu, kernel cpu, waiting for disks or waiting for the network

Unfortunately, I am on windows.. On my previous machine, I had a dual boot setup (windows 7 and Backtrack 5) but I haven't set up this laptop completely yet.... (exams.... )...So instead of setting up a dual boot environment, is there any alternative for windows which can show me similar information about my computer... ????

 

i use to have a 3.5" 5400 rpm hard drive on my PC and i can honestly see noticeable difference when swapping it with a 7200 rpm drive...

 

best way for your laptop is to add/swap with a SSD drive... I have a hybrid drive (semi SSD) and there's a little boost in speed compared to my standard 7200 rpm drive (of the same capacity)

hmmm.... So should I go for a 7200 rpm HDD or a full fledged SSD... I mean how much different would there be in 7200 rpm and SDD...?? I am pretty sure that the rest of the hardware of this machine is quite good and the thing I am interested in is whether the 7200 rpm HDD be bottlenecking my lappy's performance...?? If yes, then I think investing in an SSD would be a better idea...

 

.

Too bad there is no company giving you a disk for a limited time test, this kind of try-and-buy service would be profitable to each one.

 

Yup... its really miserable... but not everything is the way you like it to be...