Cloudbook HD
A little over a week with XP on the Cloudbook now, and I’ve pretty much determined the major bottleneck on this system is the slow hard drive. I’ve loaded up a handful of older games (most recently Unreal Tournament and Star Wars Jedi Knight II) and the all seem to run really well. UT runs almost too fast depending on the settings you use. But in the case of Star Wars JKII, even though the game runs fine…loading it up is VERY slow.
So even though the processor isn’t as fast as a full-sized laptop, I don’t think it’s bad. Every time I noticed the OS being sluggish, it seems it’s related to some hard drive activity I’m waiting on. So how do you fix something like that? Well, I thought about replacing it with a faster model. But I don’t think I want to bother to go from 3600 RPM to a 4200 RPM drive. Doesn’t seem like a worth-while upgrade knowing that there’s 5400 RPM drives out there or soon to be out there available to the public. I’d like to get a faster 5400 RPM one, but I think I’ll wait until the Toshiba ones I’ve seen are in the market for a while and come down in price.
I was checking out a program called HDPARM that was mentioned in the Cloudbooker.com forums. I’m running Windows XP, so I had to find a port of it…which doesn’t seem to have all of the features implemented. But even what I could check out seemed like it was already set to the max. I might try out that power save feature (disable) again to see if it does provide any performance improvements. I’ll take any improvement at this point, even if it’s only 1-2 MB / sec average transfer improvement.
Well, aside from the normal XP tweaks to minimize the impact the OS has on the system, I think the only thing you can do is minimize what your virus/spyware scanner is doing to the system…and try to get a hold of a more robust defragment application like Raxco PerfectDisk or O&O Defrag.
These 3rd-party programs can greatly improve disk performance above and beyond what the built-in Windows defrag application can do by performing offline defrags of the drive for system files that can’t be moved while Windows is running, defrag the pagefile, and move files closer together on the drive depending on how recently they were accessed. The most used files are closest together on the front of the drive minimizing the seek time….improving drive performance. I’m trying out a copy of PerfectDisk on the Cloudbook now, and have noticed an improvement. But you have to let this thing run often (on every boot for page file, etc.) to have it be effective.
Even at 3600 RPM, the Cloudbook’s internal drive still manages an average of 20 MB/sec transfer rate, which still is decent compared to most USB thumb drives and memory cards out there. But it’s enough of a slowdown compared to a normal laptop/desktop hard drive that you’ll probably want to optimize as much as you can to keep your transfer rates as fast as possible.
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