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Author Topic: PC that should run faster runs slower!?  (Read 1926 times)

pellessir

  • Guest
PC that should run faster runs slower!?
« on: August 14, 2012, 03:37:08 PM »
I have two PC:

1st (newer)
Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz (cache: L1 Data - 2*16KBytes 8-way, Trace - 2*12 Kuops 8-way, Level 2 - 2*1024 KBytes 8-way)
Mainboard - 8I945P-G
Memory - DDR2 3328 MBytes, Channels # Dual, DRAM Frequency 336.3 MHz
Graphics - AMD Radeon HD 6450 (1024 MBytes)
Running Windows 7 64-bit

2nd (older)
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.53GHz (cache: L1 Data - 8KBytes 4-way, Trace - 12 Kuops 8-way, Level 2 - 512 KBytes 8-way)
Mainboard - P4V88+
Memory - DDR 1,5GB, Channels # Single, DRAM Frequency 133MHz
Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 (Microsoft
Running Windows XP 32-bit

My father made a small program that generates combinations and I have found that it runs much slower in the first PC where it (I guess) should run faster. For instance, generating 30C10 and the program printing the results to the screen I see the second PC advancing much faster and generating 40C10 without printing the results to the screen the second PC finishes first. This happens both by compiling the source code in the first PC using Pelles C 64 or 32-bit.

Any ideas why this might be happening?

CommonTater

  • Guest
Re: PC that should run faster runs slower!?
« Reply #1 on: August 14, 2012, 05:26:12 PM »
As a rule OSs get slower as they mature... for example, on the same computer Win2000 will run noticeably faster than Win7.  This is largely due to Microsoft's penchant for fixing stuff that ain't broke and continuously adding more and more crap we don't need and likely never use. Unfortunately we are forced to upgrade by new "technologies" such as Core Audio, SATA and DShow that are picked up by software and hardware producers.

Second hit: If you are compiling 32 bit code, when you launch it under Win7x64 you take a hit since it has to be run under WOW64 which is a 32 bit emulator for Windows x64 systems.  Normally this passes without notice but there are cases where it can affect an otherwise good program. For example: console output gets real slow under WOW64. Try comparing the native OSs... 32 bit code on the XP machine against 64 bit code on the Win7 machine. It's likely the XP machine will still win, but by a much smaller margin.

Third hit:  Windows 7 runs an amazing amount of "WTF is this???" in the background.  If you know or if you know someone who knows about services and scheduled tasks at a reasonable level of competence, you can make significant performance gains by shutting down unnecessary background processes.

There's more to it than this, but these are the big 3...