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PC Tweaks to Optimise Performance
Equinox Studios [Avatar]
Newbie Joined: Oct 28, 2007 07:33 Messages: 3 Offline
[Post New] Jan 28, 2008 10:26
I recently installed PD5 on a new laptop - Windows XP Pro mind, wouldn't touch Vista yet.

With a 5400rpm hard drive everything is reeeaaaaly slow. With 2G RAM and dual core 2GHz Pentium I expected more. I notice that memory useage is never more than 500Meg. Drag and drop a file onto the timeline and PD can crash with furious disk activity. It's as if it shuffles clips back to the HD every time you add something to the timeline at the same time as it reads the new clip into memory and it all just runs out of bandwidth.

HD is configured for UDMA Mode 5
Write behind cache enabled - any mileage in turning this off as I have done for audio apps in the past on other machines?
Virtual Memory custom set to static 3Gig (1.5x physical RAM)
XP set for 'Best Performance', no eye-candy, no active desktop, no screensavers, power always on.
Wireless disabled in BIOS.

Any other favourite tweaks to try?
David [Avatar]
Newbie Location: England Joined: Dec 09, 2007 19:18 Messages: 45 Offline
[Post New] Jan 28, 2008 16:58
Defrag the HD and turn OFF indexing. You say dual core pentium. It is a Pentium or an E4** series Core 2 Duo (which are branded as pentium). If so it should be a pretty quick machine

If it has integrated graphics it might only have 64 or 128mb reserved for the GPU.

Run a HD test to find the actual transfer rate. It might be mis-configured.

Check your AV dosen't scan every file you access.

It sounds like your HD is thrashing for some reason, but I wouldn't have thought it likely with 2Gb of ram.
Equinox Studios [Avatar]
Newbie Joined: Oct 28, 2007 07:33 Messages: 3 Offline
[Post New] Feb 09, 2008 09:42
Hi David,

HD Tune results are favourable:
Min transfer 18.5MB/sec
Max transfer 35.0MB/sec
Average 28.4MB/sec

Access time 17.5ms
Burst rate 77.8MB/sec
CPU useage 1.2%

I notice that the activity may be related to the codec being used. The files used in the project are about 4Mbps 720x576 mpg which invoke my Nvidia decoder (the MPEG4 codec required by Media Centre to watch telly) during playback on Windows Media Player.

Other projects with other content don't inspire tha same amount of activity.
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