Raging Technoholic

OK, I admit, I probably should have entitled this “Why you probably don’t need a new machine”, but the current title is much more interesting and gets more people to read the blog post.

Also if your a die hard gamer, this is not going to apply to you.  The information may be  beneficial to you, but since your life is mostly defined by the frame rate on your video card, you can just take this as informational.

This article is really directed at those people out there that are running 3-4 year old machine, particularly those who use notebooks, who are not avid gamers but people who are avid internet users, who browse the web, download videos, use Photoshop etc.

These people own machines that are 3-4 years into their life , and their machine has just become slow over time, it just doesn’t seem to have that same speed as when they first bought it.

They might have reinstalled Windows and enjoyed a speedier machine for a few weeks or months, but then sure enough it was back to that old sluggish beast of a machine that they had before, and now they are considering buying a new machine.

I’m here to tell you that you might want to re-think that.

You see, large companies experience these same things with their machines that they give users, and they also tend to load them down with all types of things that end users never would, so our “slow down creep” issues tend to be much more pronounced than that of your home machine.

They load theirs down with virus scanners, malware blockers, software firewalls, software inventory agents, backup agents, hardware inventory agents, compliance engines, etc.  So if you imagine your machine carrying around a knapsack of things to keep in running, imagine that ours carry around a 50lb rucksack of crap.

The end result is that after a few years corporate users, much like yourselves,  start to complain that they need a new machine, that their machine has just become unusable, slow to boot, etc and ask for the powers that be to give them a shiny new notebook so that they can once again have that snappy machine that they remember getting three years ago.

Since all companies are trying to save money we decided at my company to take a long hard look at why machines tend to slow down over time, and if there was a way to fix the problems without incurring the cost of a new machine.

What we found might make you raise and eyebrow.

I won’t go into the gory details of what we found, but it really boiled down to there is no one thing that is occurring to slow our machines, down, but it’s a combination of issues compounded on an aging machine that creates an environment that causes the machine to slow down over time.

While although there was no one thing that was singularly responsible for machine slow down, we did find a solution that fixed 99% of the slow down problems, and that is move to a solid state disk.

The increase in overall machine speed was nothing short of amazing in initial testing and it became very apparent that users did not need a “new machine” with a faster processor, memory, blah blah blah, but that they have been I/O bound for years and held back by a piece of technology that has not advanced at the same rate as the other components.

For years most of the computer industry was set on selling people faster CPU’s, 2Ghz vs 1.90Ghz etc.  What we as the consumers of the machines failed to realize was that the Achilles heel of our computers we were buying was the hard disk, which for all intents and purposes has not gotten that much faster in the last 15 years compared to CPU’s, memory, video cards etc.

In other words, the disk’s performance sucks.

However the manufactures of the CPU’s, Motherboards, etc only make money when we buy new machines, so it was not in their best interest to point out that ….yeah… CPU’s got “fast enough” a few years back for most people, and since that was’t really conducive to selling more new machines they left that out of the marketing materials.

The Test

T-60 – (Time to Boot 12:30)
We took a 40 month old T-60 notebook running Windows XP that the person had major complaints about, and did a boot time test where they would power the machine on, boot into Windows, Login, open Outlook and send a test message.

We found on the older machine took about twelve minutes and thirty seconds, not what I would call very snappy.

T-400 – (Time to Boot 5:40)
Then we found a relatively new three month old machine,a T-400, and did the same boot time test and found that the T-400‘s time to reach the same point in the boot process was around five minutes and forty seconds, not bad, and if I was the guy with the T-60 you can imagine how I would want a new machine looking this T-400.

T-60 – (w/Solid State Disk 1:46)
We then did a block for block copy of the T-60 machine to a SSD so that we preserved all of the fragmentation, bloated registry etc, and did the same test, and found that the T-60 was able to reach the boot process goal in just one minute forty six seconds.

This was a machine that was 40 months old, and was three generations older in it’s CPU, Memory Speed, Graphics, etc.

Seeing the impact of what an SSD could do for an aging system it became apparent that we could retrofit our existing machines with an SSD drive for about $350, and give them back a machine that was faster (by a long shot) than a band new machine that was just three months old, and also save the company millions of dollars in the process.

I doubt the first generation of SSD’s would have given us anywhere close to this performance, since they were more of a novelty item than anything else, but with the current generation of NAND Flash memory technology, it’s possible to deliver a complete silent drive that uses less power, and has no moving parts and breathes new life into an existing ailing machine.

Well there you have it, so before you run out and buy a new shiny notebook or desktop for Christmas because yours is just to slow, think about the use case that I just mentioned and if your not some crazy gamer, or trying to find Pi, then a low cost SSD just might be for you.

Just for the record you can find SSD’s that are almost as fast in the consumer space for right around $240, in fact here is a link to one on Amazon.