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Hack&Lube · 12-14-2009, 01:44 AM

Your problem is most likely in the hard drive department.

I also have a Q6600 and I look at my CPU usage and ram monitors that I have setup all the time on my sidebar. The system will be chugging and the HDD light on the computer will be solid as it struggles to feed itself data but the CPU cores are mostly idle and only half of my 4GB of ram is ever used. The system is fast but the hard drive is a bottleneck.

If you get yourself an SSD (solid state drive) that might help a great deal but they are quite expensive. You could also try some other things to speed up conventional drives like going with WD Raptors, RAID, or having separate partitions for scratch disks (photoshop), page file (set a set size yourself, don't let the system manage it). Whenever you feel your system is slow, hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and check the ram usage under performance and see how much ram is being used.

Your problems could always be other things like your drive might badly need to be defragmented or perhaps uneccessary programs are loading or you have virus/trojans/malware, etc.

12-14-2009, 01:44 AM	#9
Hack&Lube Atomic Nerd Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Calgary Exp:	Your problem is most likely in the hard drive department. I also have a Q6600 and I look at my CPU usage and ram monitors that I have setup all the time on my sidebar. The system will be chugging and the HDD light on the computer will be solid as it struggles to feed itself data but the CPU cores are mostly idle and only half of my 4GB of ram is ever used. The system is fast but the hard drive is a bottleneck. If you get yourself an SSD (solid state drive) that might help a great deal but they are quite expensive. You could also try some other things to speed up conventional drives like going with WD Raptors, RAID, or having separate partitions for scratch disks (photoshop), page file (set a set size yourself, don't let the system manage it). Whenever you feel your system is slow, hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and check the ram usage under performance and see how much ram is being used. Your problems could always be other things like your drive might badly need to be defragmented or perhaps uneccessary programs are loading or you have virus/trojans/malware, etc. Last edited by Hack&Lube; 12-14-2009 at 01:47 AM.