This is good advice over all.

Going on your current setup it should be more than sufficient for what it seams you are trying to do. Your already running 64 bit, so maybe throw in another 4GB of RAM. Have a look at what speed RAM your using, make sure it's the fastest speed your board can take.

Also look at your hard disk, this is where you find the bottle necks is in most systems. If you don't want to fork out for a solid state, then check out western digital's Raptor drives, these are 10k rpm drives which will boost your performance.

If the systems been up and running for a bit of time, then re-installing is another good way of speeding things up.

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waiting for computer prices to drop is stupid. It never happens. google "Moores Law", by the time the thing you want has dropped, something that was epically better will be only slightly more expensive. So you wait for the price to drop on that one, and so on. Just buy what you can afford now.

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MY93 Impreza GX 1.8L, 0hp, 0nm

Your windows rating is low....something is bottlenecking your system Tim

Here's mine:



My system specs are:

E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz - overclocked to 3.83 ghz
4gb corsair dominator ddr2 1066mhz ram
2 x 512mb Nvidia 8800gt's graphics cards in SLI (Running 1080P on a 50" plazma)
3 x 160 gb sata drives (nothing flash) 1 is boot disc, the other 2 striped in a Raid array
xfx 780i 3 way sli motherboard.
750 watt power supply

< $800 in components 2 years ago (not including the case)

Cpu is watercooled, but that's just because I got a water cooled case cheap, cheap, it adds nothing to it's speed.


I'd suggest as those above have:
get rid of excess junk programs - uninstall junk
Stop excessive programs starting when windows does: Start>msconfig (in start bar search box) > Startup> untick any programs that don't need to be started with windows (like itunes etc) > save & reboot....Faster startup??

Seek times on 1tb drives can be a little slow.

Run a system tool like Everest & see what is holding your system back

Everest

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SSD will provide the greatest improvement to your current system setup, particularly in regard to boot/load times.

i7 (1366) & X58 are expensive and not dramatically better than 1156 & P55. A chip like the i5 750 is cheaper and more than quick enough, not to mention it overclocks well. Another alternative is the new 6 core AMD CPU's, namely the X6 1090T.

If you are running your HDD's off IDE it's not going to make for the quickest access times. The same goes if the 1TB extended drive is on a USB. So initial startup will be taking longer. Id be looking in these areas if you wanted to upgrade.

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MY00 WRX. 89 Prelude. 99 CRV

YEah I should change the ide to sata next time i format.

The 1tb is internal Sata Not usb

If you want to see a huge increase in system speed go for an SSD RAID-0 array for your operating system. The big bottleneck is and will always be the hard disks seeing as they are the last mechanical parts of a computer and response times measured in milliseconds not nanoseconds like everything else.

Even doubling your processor speed won't make anywhere near as much difference as an SSD drive (or even better an SSD RAID array) will to your overall performance, not to mention much more reliable and durable than hard disks.

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Maybe I should do that, buy a really good speed HDD for windows.

Does having a slower Sata drive on the system slow that one down, or was that ide days ?

Yeah that was IDE days, won't slow it down any. For even greater performance put your pagefile onto a separate SSD drive. Popular belief is that if you have enough RAM you can turn the pagefile off altogether but this only causes issues with older programs (namely games and photo/video editing programs) that still look for the presence of a pagefile and will run slower if there isn't one there.

Only thing to remember with SSD drives is never defrag them or you will significantly reduce the life of the chips. With almost instant access times there is no need to defrag them.

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