I've got a question that might be more about software than hardware, but as I'm pretty much stuck with the software I'm using there is no real point in asking about that, plus I doubt many folks hear are familiar with it anyway.
I use a program called FlexiSIGN-Pro in my work and I love it. It's similar to many CAD programs but is probably more similar to Adobe Illustrator, and also has some features found in Photoshop. I've used it for over 10 years, but the version I have is the newest version which has the same limitations as it's always had.
To the point:
The problem I have is sluggishness. Big files take forever to open and save, but the worst is when I'm just making changes to an already open file and I have to wait anywhere between 5 seconds or in extreme cases a few minutes for the action to complete. This doesn't sounds like a long time, but as a graphic designer it feels like an eternity when all you're trying to do is crop something down. Granted I know that with big files come big wait times... but I was just curious is there was a hardware upgrade that would help
Is it the CPU (Intel i5-3470 3.2 GHz) not having a high enough clock speed?
Is my RAM (8 gigs of who knows what, it came in the the Dell computer at work) not fast enough? I never use much more than 6 of my 8 gigs even with lots of programs running.
Is my HDD to slow? Need an SSD? I could see how this might help when opening or saving files, but what about working on the ones already open.
Something else entirely that I haven't thought of?
If anyone as any suggestions I'd love to hear them!
I had the exact same issues with my very first PC that i built [I reused an old hard drive], but personally i would definitely recommend that you get new hard drive before it dies, cause from experience, that is the sign it's going to die. funny enough in my case when i cloned my hard drive, to a new one, the old HDD i had in my PC died. so from personal experience i would say it's definitely the hard drive. get a new one as soon as possible.
Thanks for the advice, but I really don't think this is the issue. As I said I've had this issue with Flexi since I started using it 10 years ago on multiple different machines and multiple different versions of the program. I only have sluggishness problems when working on very large files and it's only within the program, not in other application. Some would probably say "Well what do you expect? The file is huge!".
It very well could be a software limitation, and if it is then I'm fine with that, but the problem is I don't know for sure and if faster/better hardware could give me a performance boost I'd definitely be willing to upgrade my work PC.
Just as an example, I had a raster image that was 100 inches tall x 300 inches wide (at 150 dpi), and when I cropped it down it took between 5-6 minutes to crop. But once it's cropped down to a more manageable size everything is just snap snappy like normal. This is just one of 100 different examples I could give. However just so you know we do back up all of our work files regularly.
I have a question, does that sluggishness happen constantly?
for example when on your PC and you are doing ANYTHING, does your opened programs say "not responding" for like a minute or for 10 seconds, and then goes back to normal?
What speed is your hard drive? If it's an older hard drive it might be 5400rpm, and simply upgrading to a 7200rpm or 10,000rpm could show some serious improvement in opening files. While an SSD would be the optimal solution, if you really need storage, a faster hard drive might be your answer.
I wasn't sure but I did a search from the model number in device manager "wdc wd5000bpkt-75pk4t0" and came up with a 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
Here is a little gif I just made showing another example of sluggishness. On the left is just a single vector circle. On the right are a few thousand vector circles. Again some might expect this to happen and thats fine, but if upgrading can help, well then awesome.
In graphic applications more ram is almost always better, ask your boss/IT guy for 8 gig+ more.
Most likely however is you are using a slow HD. You can bench its speed with crystaldiskmark which has helped me personally in speeding up alot of office pcs by finding weak HDs. http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html
Get a better HD, imo at least 100MB/s read/write is a minimum for office pcs, for a graphics editing pc I'd recommend an SSD.
Yup, I agree and I did ask my IT guy because my IT guy is me lol! We have a grand total of 3 employees at my job... including my boss haha.
I'm starting to think my problem really is just a software limitation because I did the exact same test shown above in the .gif in Illustrator with the exact same file, and it was still sluggish but not quite as bad. But Flexi can do things that Illustrator can't and I'm much faster in Flexi on the things that Illustrator can do... sooo we pretty much only have Illustrator so we can open certain files from customers.
It's very possible the software is sluggish, I've had old versions of adobe suite programs slow down probably because it didn't work too well with my particular setup back then. It was frustrating to say the least If you still want to keep using the software program in question however you're bound to have to increase write speeds of your storage medium and optionally add more ram. ^^
A good sized and quality SSD should sort everything out. Grab something like a samsung 850 (size up to you but I'd go 250+gb or bigger), they come with dead simple data migration tools. If you do grab a samsung 850 be sure to enable Turbo mode - it gives a lot of things bat shit crazy fast load times. Then just use your old hdd for a secondary backup. Also have a look at what processes are running in the background - lots of things like virus scanners etc chew up resources, starving others. For example if there is a hdd scan taking place in the background and its a slow drive to begin with everything else running will suffer slow performance.
Do you have a dedicated graphics card? You really can't run stuff like that without a decent amount of VRAM. You won't be accessing that heavy on the HDD after you initially load your project.
I guess a poor man's fix would be to check your bios to see if you can dedicate more RAM to your integrated graphics... or take some away to see if it gets worse and at least prove my theory. I highly recommend a real GPU and sufficient power.
It's got a Radeon 7470 in it. Again, this is just some Dell computer that was included in our franchise package. But this is supposed to be "The Beast Machine that the graphic designer uses" according to the corporate guy who helped set up our shop. That was less than 2 years ago... I laughed when he said it.
