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sluggish computer


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#1
surfpunk

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I have a 3ish year old computer, its a Dell pentium 4 3Ghz 1gb of ram with a 300gb hard drive (well, two 150s) and it seems to be running rather slow, a lot slower than it should. i have about 100gigs of video (raw uncompressed footage from my own camera) and about 40gigs worth of music. all together i have over 160gigs used up.

am I correct to assume that having my harddrive so full that its slowing my computer down? I dont have all that many programs (only the ones i use) and my computer starts up with minimal programs.

anyways, I was thinking of getting a 250gb external HD just to store my media on it (music, video, pictures) and leaving the other 300gb just for programs and windows itself. just wondering if that is going to even make a difference, or should I go another route.
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#2
Marty L Mayes

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Have you emptyed out your temp files, on c:, and go to tools, internet options, to get rid of cookies, and run antispyware software? anddefraged the HD. it should run fine. but more hd is ok..
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#3
surfpunk

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yeah ive done all that, i try and keep my computer in a healthy condition. basically i just want to know whether or not having all my media on another HD will make a difference with how my computer performs.
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#4
Kurenai

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No, since you're only using 160 out of 300 GB, it wouldn't make a noticable difference, except:
Make sure you have a decent bit of space left on the drive that Windows is installed to. You want to fill up the second driver first.
What type of antivirus and antispyware programs do you use?
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#5
surfpunk

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AVG antivirus and Ad-aware antispyware... the computer sees both hard drives as one (theres only one c drive), is there anyway to change this and make sure all my files are on one HD?
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#6
Drumbum667

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When Dell gave it to you since it recognizes the two hd's as one its probably a RAID 0 setup. Withe RAID 0 it stores part of a file on one harddrive and the rest on the other. I don't know if this is correct it probably is. I don't know if you can change it considering its a DELL computer and not home built.
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#7
Drumbum667

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When Dell gave it to you since it recognizes the two hd's as one its probably a RAID 0 setup. Withe RAID 0 it stores part of a file on one harddrive and the rest on the other. I don't know if this is correct it probably is. I don't know if you can change it considering its a DELL computer and not home built.
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