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Dedward;
I was able to do a good amount of research on your hardware, BIOS, and your software. I got the information from a combination of Microsoft Technet and MSDN, from community blogs for your software and the support sites for the software I was not familiar with. There are about three distinct levels of corrections and tuning that may have to be preformed. I suggest that we approach each level one at a time since they fixes rely on the previous problems to have been mitigated before any benefit from the next level will actually work. the levels involve:
- There are severe bottlenecks in your system which need to be opened
- There are serious contentions for system resources which will need operating system, System services, and program contentions tuning.
- If needed we might have to start playing with memory management and Processor Affinity tweaks. If we have to get into this level things can get very complicated as tuning for one kind of operation can easily have negative effects on other operations. This could mean setting up different hardware configurations and different logins ,each with different settings depending on what portion of the work flow you are in. An example would be the different processor affinities and memory/buffer settings that would be set up for rendering vs using the browser, email, and Word Processing in a given session. My "gut" feeling is that this level wil wind up to being of minimal value (small return on investement)after we have successfully gone through 1 & 2.
Lets hit level 1 since you have just done or are in the process of reloading the system anyway. Since you are at this step it would be of great benefit to set up in 64 bit mode, since 32 bit mode can only address 3 Gb (3.245 actually) of memory and inevitably there will be large and significant gains possible by. if your motherboard can take it, bringing the system up to 6 Gb of memory.
Before we start tweaking We need to, if you haven't already shut down unneeded Services, Unneeded auto startups, Shut down the Vista eye-candy,and tune virtual memory You need to ensure you are disconnecting from the web turning off the Communications boards, shutting down print spooling and shutting down anti virus when rendering He also needs a second physical drive preferrably with 10,000 rpm spindle but a 7,200 will suffice for cost.
Problems and inter relationships in level 1:
Memory:
A ) Vista will load up to just over 1.5 Gb into active memory
B ) Your applications with buffers, cues, and system overheads appear to be capable of asking for up to 1.5 Gb of memory.
C) We have yet to count in the additional memory requirements required for whatever services are running, any other programs, any large driver such as the nVidea drivers and software, Communications stacks, and process inter communications. Plus we have yet to allow for the inevitable program "memory leaks" for which Photoshop is notorious and which all programs are guilt of to one degree or another.
CONTIBUTION TO SLOW SYSTEM: Given these three facts you are going to be doing VERY HEAVY paging
You only has 1 Hard drive with 2 partitions. So the paging, scrap files, temporary files , program calls, dll loads the entire system is bottlenecked and at the mercy of the disk controller all bottle-necked and at the mercy of the hard drive so I can only imagine what that looks like when you are rendering !
So here are the first two changes which should give you a major performance increase
1) Get at least one more hard drive, two if you have room and get at least 7200 rpm spindle speeds. use your first drive to the operating system and Program installs ( this could be your original drive.
On Drive 2 put your user directories (documents, music, media files, rendered work and files ready for assembly) and this will also be where we place the Virtual memory file.
The 3rd drive will be used for all the temporary and work files for graphics and videos or 3D working directories. This drive will require constant de-fragging
With the additional disks in place You can now re set the Virtual Memory to starting size of 6 Gig and ending size of 6 Gig and put it resident on the 2nd drive.
Turn on Pre Fetch on drives 1 and 2
We have now taken care of memory issues, severe disk bottle necks and l a lot of system resource contentions
There are a few more things that might be possible but I have to know what the BIOS will allow you control over.
When this step is done we will re run bench marks, with out knowing exactly how bad things were previously, I would estimate at least 25 to 34 % increase
Check back with any questions,
-Ed
