PC sucks - so slow compared to Macintosh

[peranders]

Hi!

Subject only eyecatcher...

Can anybody explain why 585 MB (x40 CD P4, 1,8 GHz) takes 9 minutes, 15 sec. to copy from CD to harddisk? It takes 80 minuter with a Compaq Celeron 800(?) MHz.

Both XP

With a tired old Beige 266 MHz G3 Macintosh it takes only 5 minutes. 5400 rpm disk and x8 CD!

Why is PC so slow? Is something not trimmed?

 

[peranders]

What is the PC doing when the CD is not spinning and there is no writing on the harddisk?? Very noticable on the Celeron PC.

If the PC had desktop files (which Mac has) which is updated all the time I could understand the whole thing PC hasn't any, or?

 

[tiroth]

Most likely the CDROM is at fault. Most CDROMs are of extremely low quality.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Mac CDROM was better than the average PC one. Have you tried a better brand? (Plextor, VeloCD?)

 

[UrSv]

Hi!

Subject only eyecatcher...

Can anybody explain why 585 MB (x40 CD P4, 1,8 GHz) takes 9 minutes, 15 sec. to copy from CD to harddisk? It takes 80 minuter with a Compaq Celeron 800(?) MHz.

Both XP

With a tired old Beige 266 MHz G3 Macintosh it takes only 5 minutes. 5400 rpm disk and x8 CD!

Why is PC so slow? Is something not trimmed?

That performance depends on a lot of things. My guess would be bad drivers/incorrect installation with respect to IDE channels/bad CD drive. I hope you are not serious that it takes 80 minutes on the Celeron. There is something seriously wrong if it does. The difference should not be that big for the two PC systems.

Obviously also very common is that the CD is scratched and there is a huge difference in how diffferent drives behave when that is the case. Swap the drives in the Windows PCs (should be easy swap)...

/Urban

/UrSv

 

[fezz]

ok i dont know how technical you want me to go into this but here goes:

looking at the specks (i know them off hand) the MAC uses a 66MHz FSB, with IDE 33MB/S hard disk transfers - this limits the whole transfer of data from the hard disk or CD drive to CD writer to 33MB/s at this is only a theritecal speed, and there will be two devices on the same IDE cable - this is 1/2 of that - 16.75MB/s top

in comparison the celeron system can (depending on motherboard) have a 100MHz FSB, and can transfer data from the hard disk to other thing (such as CD writer) at speeds of up to 100MB/s

again in real life this will be halved to 50MB/s

modern P4's can transfer data around their motherbaord at speeds of up to 533MHz and data at speeds of up to 133MB/s

macs ARE NOT faster - the speed difference you see is down to the mac operating system only being able to do one thing at once - so all the speed of the back is put into buring the CD - the pc's can do other things at once so do both tasks slower then they would normally

 

[peranders]

Re: Re: PC sucks - so slow compared to Macintosh

That performance depends on a lot of things. My guess would be bad drivers/incorrect installation with respect to IDE channels/bad CD drive. I hope you are not serious that it takes 80 minutes on the Celeron. There is something seriously wrong if it does. The difference should not be that big for the two PC systems.

Obviously also very common is that the CD is scratched and there is a huge difference in how diffferent drives behave when that is the case. Swap the drives in the Windows PCs (should be easy swap)...

The CD is in perfect condition. The same CD was used in all machines. The Celeron is painfully slow when it comes to larger files. I'm not kidding, the Celeron is soooo slow.

I think also something isn't at optimum. The P4 is a Dell but since the XP was 2001 and not updated when I bought the PC recently I suspect drivers also maybe outdated. When you compress files the P4 is 8 times faster than the old Mac (266 MHz compared to 1,8 GHz) so there you experience a normal difference in the right direction.

 

[peranders]

The CD is HL-DT-CD-ROM GCR-8481B Brand?? My DVD burner is Philips, equally slow!

 

[UrSv]

What is the PC doing when the CD is not spinning and there is no writing on the harddisk?? Very noticable on the Celeron PC.

If the PC had desktop files (which Mac has) which is updated all the time I could understand the whole thing PC hasn't any, or?

It depends. If it is the standard PC the it will be doing things like running MS (Office) indexing services, MS Windows Update checks , all software that has automatic update checks will be checking Internet connections, the desktop and other refresh will be done (yes, it does do that) and most importantly I think it will think about what the **ll all those entries in the registry REALLY are for (joke?).

/UrSv

 

[peranders]

macs ARE NOT faster - the speed difference you see is down to the mac operating system only being able to do one thing at once - so all the speed of the back is put into buring the CD - the pc's can do other things at once so do both tasks slower then they would normally

No Mac aren't very faster than PC. Tests show that certain things are faster and some other are slower... The hardware is the same in many cases.

This multitasking stuff. My P4 isn't very usefull when it's copying! Sloooow in other things. Mac is notiable slower but the copying speed is reduced when copying in the background. I don't know though how a G4 and Mac Unix is in this copying business. I suspect that UNIX is better than XP in many things.

 

[Christer]

Could be millions of things. For instance,
1) do you have the CD and harddisk on the same IDE channel
on the slow machine? (should not be the case)
2) Is DMA enabled for both devices? (should be faster when
enabled, although the opposite may also happen if there are
incompatibility problems).
3) Are latest drivers installed for all devices?
4) the other n millions minus three possibilities.

 

[Havoc]

Got a virus scanner running?

 

[moses]

Peranders: You probably have the default windows install, which is probably dirty of bloated with included manufactor's crap, reformat put a fresh install of windows. Next, if you have the harddrive and CD-ROM on the same ATA chain, it will be very slow, as ATA can't handle interleaved I/O on the same channel very well at all. Update your chipset drivers, as this can make a huge difference. If you're running WinXP make sure you have SP1. Make sure DMA is enabled for both devices, other wise it will be doing PIO(if the computer is extremely slow when ripping the CD, it could very likely be that the CD-ROM is in PIO mode which will eat all of the CPU cycles it can).

fezz: Err. Most modern HD's really can't sustain *squential* transfers faster then 35MB/s or so. While ATA/66 and ATA/100 add some useful features, along with faster cache bursts, the overall bandwidth they provide isn't much of a blessing. Aso a Pentium 4 Celeron with a 100Mhz QDR bus(Capable of transfering the same amount of data as a 400Mhz, not quite the same latency however) with a 64 bit wide data bus. That provides 3.2GB/s of theorytical bandwidth. Going upto a 133Mhz QDR bus provides a health 4.2GB/s of bandwidth, quite a set from 133MB/s .

 

[tiroth]

ok i dont know how technical you want me to go into this but here goes:

I think you are mistaken about a great many things.

 

[peranders]

Thank you guys and for the input. I suspect that Dell hasn't trimmed the performance at all. Is it normal for instance that a PC manufacturer install not the newest OS? Normal would be the newest available OS!

I have a Dell 8200 with DVD-burner, CD, ZIP, Turtle Beach Sound Card, Firewire and USB and some graphic (OK performance, don't remember the type, nVidia???)

 

[Christer]

I have no personal experience with Dell, I don't like those brand
name PCs. However, one should not assume they are always
competent to install the software right. I friend told me a few
years ago that they had bought a large number of Dell machines
at his work, and they were all terribly slow. Dell never managed
to solve the problem, as I understand it. I don't know what
happened eventually, but one should not accept it. It can be
that the software is not correctly installed, or the wrong drivers
are used, but it can also be that some pieces of hardware don't
get along very well. Whatever the case, if one buys a whole
machine with OS installed, it should work. It is up to the seller
to fix the problems.

 

[Christer]

looking at the specks (i know them off hand) the MAC uses a 66MHz FSB, with IDE 33MB/S hard disk transfers - this limits the whole transfer of data from the hard disk or CD drive to CD writer to 33MB/s at this is only a theritecal speed, and there will be two devices on the same IDE cable - this is 1/2 of that - 16.75MB/s top


The FSB does not decide the transfer speed on the IDE channels,
although the FSB will usually be a multiple of the IDE speed. There
are various ATA standards for the IDE channels, using transfer
speeds of 33, 66 and 100 MB/s (maybe there are even faster
ones now). You cannot choose this arbitrarily depending on
which CPU you put in the machine, since both motherboard and
IDE devices must be specified for the particular ATA standard
you are using.

You are right, though, that two devices on the same channel
will compete for the bandwidth, which is why one usually puts
hard disk and CD writer on different IDE channels.


in comparison the celeron system can (depending on motherboard) have a 100MHz FSB, and can transfer data from the hard disk to other thing (such as CD writer) at speeds of up to 100MB/s

again in real life this will be halved to 50MB/s


No, as I said above, there is no such correlation between FSB
and IDE channels. The FSB specifies the clock frequency on the
bus between the processor and the chip set. This is often, but
not always the same as the clock frequency on the memory bus.
The PCI and IDE buses must usually be synchronized with the
FSB so that the FSB is a multiple of both these. The chipset used
determines how much flexibility there is in choosing different
multiples.


modern P4's can transfer data around their motherbaord at speeds of up to 533MHz and data at speeds of up to 133MB/s


What do you mean???
I think, however, you are assuming that the FSB figure refers to
the number of bytes per second that can be transferred, which
is not the case. The FSB is the clock frequency on the bus
between the CPU and the chip set. The actual transfer rate
depends on the width of this bus and how often data can be
transferred (once per clock cycle, twice,...) On the memory bus
(which need not have the same clock frequency) you usually do
not transfer data every clock cycle, since dynamic RAM are used,
and these need several clock cycles per access.

 

[ThingyNess]

Listen to Christer. The problem is very likely either that DMA is disabled on one or more of your IDE devices (hard drive or CD-ROM/RW), or that the hard drive you're trying to copy to and the CD-ROM are on the same IDE channel.

Go into your system control panel, open your device manager, and enable dma for all devices on your hard disk controller, and reboot.

If it's still slow, they're most likely sharing an IDE channel.

If it's set up right, any PC will have little difficulty maxing out the cd-rom speed, whether it's a Pentium 100, or a Dual P4 Xeon.

It's also possible (albeit not likely) that they have the cd-rom and/or hard drive forced into PIO (instead of DMA) mode in the BIOS. Why they'd do that is beyond me, but stranger things have happened.

The other possibility of course, is the virus scanner - make *sure* that's disabled.


Now, since your computer has 4 ide devices (an atapi cd-rw, an atapi DVD-rom, an ATAPI Zip drive, and a hard drive), they're guaranteed to all be sharing an ide channel unless dell put a second ide controller in the machine.

Try copying from the DVD-rom instead of the CD-RW, or vice versa. Only one of them can share an ide channel with the hard drive, so one of the two will be significantly faster than the other.

 

[jean-paul]

Mac sucks - too fast compared to PC's

Am I the only one that doesn't like these eyecatchers ?
I remember some time ago someone opened a thread stating : "Black Gate sucks" just to get attention. A lot of discussion about the topic title troubled the thread.

There is nothing really wrong with it, but there might be a chance people give reactions on the "eyecatcher" and the thread might develop a debate concerning the topic title.

BTW: If you think pc's suck and Mac's are OK I think the s*cker is the Mac-guy that bought the pc, don't you ?

 

[peranders]

I think my eyecatcher wasn't too off-topic though.

I don't mind PC if it has cooler features than Mac but in many things Microsoft can't manage to steal the whole idea, just parts of it.

Take a good example: The desktop! Rather confused concept. You can't work from the desktop with windows covering it, because of the windows concept which they didn't understand fully. Some programs can't be opened by double clicking and file (Microchip MPLAB).

Take the user concept and the networking concept. Not easy to understand, compared to Mac.

Why have MS no (or almost no) short commands? How do I create a new folder with the keyboard only? CMD-N on a Mac.

The reason why I bought this new PC was that the old 486 was too old.... I do some programming on the PC.

 

[jgwinner]

Defrag your hard drive!

It makes a HUGE difference in speed. If you send / receive a lot of email, or surf the web it'll fragment a hard drive fast.

Be happy, most Unix servers I deal with don't have defrag utilities. We recently had to rebuild a large client's hard drives from scratch for this (backup all shipping data for a major PC manufacturer to tape, format the RAID array, restore from tape).