AMDs scream. A friend gave me an HP All-In-One with an AMD slug and it boots Win10 from stone-cold in 40 seconds. And that’s using an HDD. That PC isn’t in a mission-critical role or I’d drop an SSD in it just to see what it does to boot times.
In fact it was AMDs who brought the multi-core thing to PCs. Some of the UNIX manufacturers had been doing multi-cores before that but IIRC AMD went to it because it offered a solution to the overheating problems that came from just endlessly cranking up the clock cycles.
Earlier this month I bought a refurbed Dell Optiplex 5040 off a noted online retailer (box probably came back from corporate or institutional lease) with a quad-core Intel i5 CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a 250 GB SSD ... for $140. Shipped free. I added another 1TB SSD, loaded Linux Mint (Cinnamon) on it, put a swap slice on both SSDs with the same priority (which effectively makes them striped/Raid0) and it is faster than stink. Astonishing performance for a $200 investment.
SSDs raise the performance of virtual memory to a whole ‘nother level, especially when you stripe multiple devices. I’ve got a couple of boxes I put a small SSD in just so I could have virtual memory on a solid stated drive separate from the drive the OS was on. It’s a YUGE boost to a box that only can support 4GB of RAM. More’s the pity SSDs (and the interface to support all that speed) didn’t come along when PCs all were still 32-bit.
Set Visual to Performance under Advanced System Settings and it will scream.
#35 Thanks for the suggestion. I just ordered the following for my sister who has a XP computer that has been giving her many errors.
HP Z240 Small Form Factor Workstation, Intel Quad Core i5-6500 up to 3.6GHz, 16G DDR4, 512G SSD, WiFi, BT 4.0, DVD, Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit
Also has TPM for Windows 11 (Renewed) $123.99
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B085LMQQLC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
With my Visa Gift Card discount at Amazon:
Order total: $17.24
$17+ bucks!!
https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04892038