Work PC (XP) Faster than Home Desktop (Win 7 x64)

Work PC: Windows XP, Dual Core E5200 2.5Ghz, 2GB RAM
Home Desktop: see www.techcomet.com/p/my-gadgets.html

The PC at work, although much slower than my desktop, seems to launch basic programmes like Google Chrome and MS Word much faster than my faster home desktop. I have no idea why. Originally, I thought it was because I had a lot of applications installed but even after reformatting it was discernibly slower.

As an example, when I click on Microsoft Word 2007 at work it opens up INSTANTLY. Literally, right after clicking on the icon it launches. However, at home I have to wait 1-2s.

The home desktop is not really “slow” in fact it performs very well in most cases, however considering I spent so much time and effort putting it together, it annoys me that my work PC (a stock Lenovo office desktop) is so much faster.

Obviously, if I started comparing games or Photoshop my Work PC would be slower, but for the most part I do basic web browsing and documents (and play the occasional game, or edit the occasional file on photoshop), so I want to really ensure my desktop is running as well as it should.

Finally, I do run a LOT of background applications on my desktop, but even then I don’t think it should be slower than my work pc.

Any thoughts?

You could disable AERO and see if that helps.

Also, if I understand correctly, Win 7 (and Vista) has a feature called Superfetch which learns what apps you use and will position them for faster retrieval, so once you've used your PC a while the common apps should start opening faster.

Didn't you say in the other thread (Windows 7 x64 pagefile, scratch disk, temp files, etc) that superfetch is disabled when a SSD is used?

In any case XP doesn't have superfetch, and still the work PC is much faster at launching programmes.

If the programs are stored on your SSD drive then yeah it would be disabled, an SSD drive should seem near instantaneous. Nothing else is coming to mind, hopefully some of the others can spitball some ideas.

Thanks again, at this point the most likely culprit is the fact that I run a LOT of background software (e.g. skype, digsby, tweetdeck, etc.) on my Home PC. Nevertheless considering it is quite powerful it shouldn't be that slow anyway.

Well, first of all, turn off all backgound software you don't immediately need or use. It chews up RAM unnecessarily and such.

That's what I would do first of all.

I guess that would put both PCs on par, but it would make my home PC unusable unfortunately. That is, I tend to use the background software that is running.

In any case I have 6GB of RAM and only about 4GB is ever used.

It wouldn't make your PC unusable, you would just have to do a few more mouse clicks.

If you're chewing up 4GB of RAM out of 6GB total. Yes, Windows 7 will run slow.

The analogy I can think of is pumping water, you're pumping a lot of water at home and you wonder why you can't pump as much as the one at work which is mostly just on standby to pump.

You built the system so therefore you'll figure it out, eventually. Maybe tweaking the drivers. I could explain how to do that but I'm too tired at the moment.

Fair enough. It has been suggested that because I am running an AV and an anti-malware tool on my Home PC, this may be causing a slow down.

This is quite interesting, as that is probably one of the major differences between the two systems. I think I will look into it and perhaps disable the anti-malware tool to see if there is an improvement

Well even between different brands of antivirus there are differing effects to speed.

But if you want to try your system w/o malware running, that's not as dangerous as going w/o any AV.