PC getting Slow - Where should I spend my limited funds?

Luckless wrote in post #17610071
I keep a google docs spreadsheet with all the apps I actually care about, and links to their websites. That way when I go back to install stuff I can just pull clean updated installers as needed.

In that case you should check this site out: https://ninite.com/

Download the package and run it and it will grab the latest versions of the base applications every PC has at least a hand full of.

Oh, thanks. I hadn't actually come across that one. I've used a few other similar looking automation installers in the past, but I never got a clean install of everything out of any single go, and dropped them rather than putting the effort into getting things sorted. (I also don't really do it all that often for any given setup anyway. I deal with a number of different computers daily, but they're all configured differently without much overlap in software, and I reinstall everything maybe once every year or two if not longer so never had a pressing need for automation.) But I might start using that for a few of the minor things.

However I do enjoy popping on to the webpages when reinstalling anyway, simply because it is a good chance to double check what's been going on with the project and if there were any interesting announcements or features I missed.

Hi again, what folders and files do I need to have on my SSD for best performance?

Obviously Windows install, but do I install all software to the SSD and my Lightroom Catalog? just leaving my documents, photos, movies on my standard 2tb drive?

Milutiche wrote in post #17611605
Hi again, what folders and files do I need to have on my SSD for best performance?

Obviously Windows install, but do I install all software to the SSD and my Lightroom Catalog? just leaving my documents, photos, movies on my standard 2tb drive?

Think of LR use from the standpoint of data flow...

1. Read RAW file from file storage area
   
2. Read the list of file changes from the LR catalog area
   
3. Interpret #1 and #2 into a Preview file, and store the Preview information to be reused when needed (per your preferences for keeping it around)
   
4. Write list of edits (to be performed on the RAW file), into the current RAW file's list of changes which is stored within the LR catalog
   
5. When 'storing' changes, do nothing (after all, no alterations were done to RAW itself, and the edits are already within the catalog file!)
   

1. Read LR main program into RAM
   
2. Read LR subroutines into RAM as requested by user actions
   
3. Read Microsoft subroutines into RAM as dictated by LR needing to do different operations
   

Milutiche wrote in post #17608737
Hello everybody.

I've got a PC that is getting a little long in the tooth and getting a bit slow to be fair
It's a Asus P7P55D-E LX with an Intel i7 870 @ 3200, 8gb of RAM
Hard drives are -
Primary Samsung HD103SJ 1TB (contains OS and Program Files, Lightroom Catalog)
Secondary Western Digital WD20EARK 2TB (With Photos, Videos Etc)

when I run the windows Experience it appears that the Hard Drives are my weakness Scoring only 5.9 while everything else is between 7.2 and 7.9

Would it be worth upgrading my Hard drives to get a bit more performance? I mostly use it for Web Browsing, Photo Editing in Lightroom and watching the odd Movie

Thanks

Jason

I think this is a great thread but it seems to miss the point that your current machine whilst older now is far from being a slow machine and that other things than the age of the machine are the issue, yes upgrading to an SSD is the best thing to do for fast and huge speed increase however what else is in your computer that has affected your speed, what programs and how many have you got starting up on boot up? many ways you can speed up your current configuration with out changing the machine. Have you tried a fresh install on the machine? a pain I know but it gives you a base point for your machine speed.


Graeme

Wilt wrote in post #17611737
Think of LR use from the standpoint of data flow...

1. Read RAW file from file storage area
   
2. Read the list of file changes from the LR catalog area
   
3. Interpret #1 and #2 into a Preview file, and store the Preview information to be reused when needed (per your preferences for keeping it around)
   
4. Write list of edits (to be performed on the RAW file), into the current RAW file's list of changes which is stored within the LR catalog
   
5. When 'storing' changes, do nothing (after all, no alterations were done to RAW itself, and the edits are already within the catalog file!)
   

Think of LR use from a program execution point of view...

1. Read LR main program into RAM
   
2. Read LR subroutines into RAM as requested by user actions
   
3. Read Microsoft subroutines into RAM as dictated by LR needing to do different operations
   

ANY of those actions, which ordinarily involves a harddisk seek or read or write, are improved with an SSD. What you do not move to SSD is limited to the harddrive speeds (slower than SSD). If you need to have the system 'do two things at once', dividing those tasks into two separate units will increase the throughput. So if you understand that program execution is one task, and data retrieval and writing is another task, and put each task onto a different unit, you will increase throughtput.

You've lost me a bit there to be totally honest. lol

ghce wrote in post #17611797
I think this is a great thread but it seems to miss the point that your current machine whilst older now is far from being a slow machine and that other things than the age of the machine are the issue, yes upgrading to an SSD is the best thing to do for fast and huge speed increase however what else is in your computer that has affected your speed, what programs and how many have you got starting up on boot up? many ways you can speed up your current configuration with out changing the machine. Have you tried a fresh install on the machine? a pain I know but it gives you a base point for your machine speed.

Graeme

I tried a clean install about 6 months ago and once I had installed all of my essential software I was at about 75% performance at a guess, I hardly ever shut my computer down because it can take over 5 minutes to boot, in the past month or so I've added about 15,000 photos to my catalog and the HDDs are getting near 80% full, I think I will go with a clean install on the SSD and hopefully I'll be able to keep track of what I install and how it effects performance.

As far as startup programs, I actually don't know what I can kill, I think I use most of the things that boot automatically.

SSD drives don't really degrade in performance as they're filled up, whereas spinning drives may access data at the borders of the platter at half the speed as at the center, anything that used to cause trouble in terms of disk access will go away.

More importantly, disk drives always had a delay in accessing blocks of data, particularly if they ended up scattered on the disk surface (which is why defragmentation was required), but the SSD can access all the data at a moments notice. On top of that, disk drives read data sequentially and have to queue up read/write tasks, while SSDs do not, but you'd need an NVME drive to take full advantage of that.

Hey there, I'm just about to order myself a SSD, can you give me an idea of how you would install Windows/ Lightroom to get best performance? taking into consideration that I am adding the SSD to a fully functional PC should I just install windows to the SSD and then all other program files to my standard HDD? I'm a bit confused

After upgrading mine.
Personally I would create an image file incase you have problems.
Then I would do a clean install on the ssd.
Load Windows and your application s/w on the ssd.

Remember to change the bios to AHIC and set "as SATA"

It will be minutes before you will want to replace all your hard discs with SSDs , other than say some for long term backup storage.

As you sound about as PC literate as me ( no offence meant ) I can not recommend Samsung 850 Evos more strongly. They Are cheap, super -fast, reliable and come with Magician. This is great software, as a 6 year old could tune the system best for best performance on an SSDs .
Nb dont forget to turn off "scheduled disc defragging" first . Its not needed on SSDs and just prematurely wears them out.
Best thing I ever did to a PC!.
Editing in Photoshop is like lightning, instead of painful.
Rebooting takes seconds not minutes .... And I mean 15 seconds!
Using a healing tool is instantaneous.
Looading a shoot of 600 28MB images into DPP4 is just instant.

Well worth the clean i stall to get rid of years of crude that accumulates.... IMO.

For me a good analogy would be....if you won a new Ferrari but it came with no oil. Would you a) go out and buy 8 litres of the very best 0W-40 Mobil 1 or nb) syphon out the old oil from your existing pick up!

Cheers mate, did you put your "my Pictures" folders on the SSD too?

Milutiche wrote in post #17651952
Cheers mate, did you put your "my Pictures" folders on the SSD too?

Yes , sorry maybe I forgot to say, but it is my only disc on the Laptop.

On my newly ordered workstation, there will be 3 discs :-
> 1st SSD 256GB for the OS and the applicarion software such as Photoshop and DPP4
> 2nd SSD 400 GB very fast Intel 750 for the pictures from my last shoot and the shoots I am working on ( max 5 ). And recently finiished shoots say about 10 shoots (circa 400 to 600 images each) that have not yet been archived to external WD Passport USB 3.0 drives.
> 3rd SSD 500 GB Samsung 850 Evo, is a copy of the second disc images, and as many recent shoot that is possible .
The latter ensures there are always 2 copies of each shoot somewhere. As this fills I then copy the oldest to cheap external drives for long term storage. Mainly for economy but also as I heard a rumour that the shelf life of SSDs are not as long as HDDs .?

But I would now always have the pictures I am working on and the OS on an SSD.

Is there any mention of the graphics card here? What card are you using?

My vote would be (in order of priority)...

1. SSD. It does make a huge difference for the OS (less so for anything else).
2. Upgrade to a GFX card with better CUDA support (Adobe Lightroom takes advantage of this).
3. RAM. 8GB is actually fine for Lightroom though. Move to video editing and that would need an upgrade. Still, more is always better.

Torsten.

I'd upgrade your Ram first to 16GB. I just updated my laptop today from 8g to 16g and lightroom doesn't slow anymore. Before LR would be using around 6-7gb of memory after running for a while and doing HDR merges etc, now after upgrading it's going up in the 12 GB range. I don't notice the slowdown anymore getting to that 'ceiling.'
A SSD is always nice, but if you do a lot of stuff in LR, I'd recommend the memory first. (memory will have more impact in LR than a SSD)

Milutiche wrote in post #17608737
Hello everybody.

I've got a PC that is getting a little long in the tooth and getting a bit slow to be fair
It's a Asus P7P55D-E LX with an Intel i7 870 @ 3200, 8gb of RAM
Hard drives are -
Primary Samsung HD103SJ 1TB (contains OS and Program Files, Lightroom Catalog)
Secondary Western Digital WD20EARK 2TB (With Photos, Videos Etc)

when I run the windows Experience it appears that the Hard Drives are my weakness Scoring only 5.9 while everything else is between 7.2 and 7.9

Would it be worth upgrading my Hard drives to get a bit more performance? I mostly use it for Web Browsing, Photo Editing in Lightroom and watching the odd Movie

Thanks

Jason

Seriously, get one of these SSD: Samsung 2.5-Inch 1 TB 850 EVO Solid State Drive, seriously fast, also, if your mobo can upgrade RAM do so to 16Gb, turn off paging files and if you know a bit about memory overclocking, do it