Slow computer performance on a decent configuration

Question

I bought a new computer like a year ago, and I must say that I am unhappy. Although I chose the best components that were available in my country then, my computer's performance drives me to madness. My configuration is this: Intel core i3-530 2.93 GHz 4GB 1333 MHz RAM ATI Radeon HD 5550 1 GB DD3 video card WDC Caviar Green WD15EARS 1.5 TB

Now, I suspect that the hard drive is causing those troubles. I was not the one who chose it, but I liked it because of the huge amount of space, although I did not know anything about it's performance. Later on, I found out about it's bad performance, and read many comments on the same topic. If that is not the reason, I would be real thankful if you could provide me with some additional details. In case that other information about my computer is needed, feel free to ask me.

To explain this issue a bit, I will say that the computer is slow pretty much the whole time. The worse is when I start it up, the first 10 minutes are so bad, that even Mozilla lags, and is real annoying to use. Mozilla actually continues to lag even after that, but much rarer. Mozilla as far as I know should be running like a charm on a configuration like this, and even my laptop which is like then times worse than this runs Mozilla without lagging at all, on start up or after working for some time.

Regarding games, they do run good. I am able to run pretty good games on high resolution with high details, although the video card crashes some times. I've overclocked the video card using ATI Catalyst Center, as so far I haven't experienced any problems like overheating.

The computer needs like 5 minutes to start up, or like 15 if you want to use it without wanting to get annoyed.

Answer 1

Have you changed your Power Settings to High Performance, at all? Often on Windows Vista and 7, this can have a dramatic effect on performance, especially with "green" components.

For reference, I have a green WD 1.5TB drive and it does spin down quite frequently, so you may want to look for a blue or black WD drive (if the flooding in Thailand hasn't put those drives out of your budget) for booting up.

For general usage though, the drive isn't too slow, once it gets going after the five-to-ten second spin-up period.

Answer 2

Its possible you may have so many unnecessary processes getting started at startup. Use CCleaner to get rid of temporary files. Stop unnecessary processes which starts at winows stratup from CCleaner or Goto run-> services.msc and stop unwanted process which starts up automatically..

Link : https://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=1688