Can someone please help me with my computer?

Question

If i have one celeran processer in my comuter. I have about 1000 songs stored on there. Would this amount of songs stored on there effect the speed of my computer at all...would it make it slower?

Would it help if i had two pentiun processors?

Answer 1

The number of songs is almost certainly NOT the reason your computer is running slowly.

The slowness could be down to a number of things, including loading too many supposedly 'helpful' programs on to your computer, or even viruses/spyware that you've inadvertantly acquired from the internet.

THERE IS PROBABLY NO NEED TO UPGRADE YOUR COMPUTER. You are much better off getting in your local computer expert to back up all your data/songs, then reinstall all the software to 'out of the box' state. Get a recommended expert to do this (should take 2-3 hours, probably £70-£100) or take it to the PC World computer clinic.

You almost certainly DON'T need to buy any more hardware - all that is needed is a good spring-clean (think of it like taking a car for a service).

Answer 2

I've read the other comments, and some are definitely worth looking into, like defragmenting you hard drive, also I have suggestions (or requests for more detailed information) Are you removing IE cookies, and clearing out all the muck that collects when you go online? If, after a good defrag, your computer still seems slow, you might want to check out how much RAM (random access memory) your computer has built in. The more RAM you have installed, the computer may speed up some. I think newer computers are now shipped out with only 256 MB RAM - to check on your RAM, go to start>control panel>system icon and double click to open your system properties (basically what stuff you have that runs your computer). The very first page there, around the bottom right, should tell you how much RAM you have. You can then figure out if you want to up the RAM, and see what happens.
Oh, and 1,000 songs can mean almost anything, what's important is how large are they? I have a 1 track "song" that's actually an entire album of Enya (she is the best!) but again it's the amount of space they are taking up on the computer, and if your computer does have a CD burner, why not burn your songs to Cd's and get them off the computer (lol, so you can collect more)

Answer 3

The processor has absolutely nothing to do with the media stored on your computer, if you had 10000 songs on there, it's the Hard Drive these things are stored on and in order not to slow it down you need memory (RAM), the reason why when you have a lot on your computer it slows down is because the heads inside the hard drive are having to seek for the data it needs and this data can be strewn all over the drive, this is known as fragmented data, and defraging the drive is a way of keeping data together in the same sector on the Hard Drive so it isn't having to seek, the memory is used to temporarily store data from the hard drive loading into the processor, the processor only slows the computer down if you are trying to do too much and putting too many commands through at the one time.

Answer 4

To directly answer your question: No.

You have not said that your computer IS slower...just that you want to know IF IT WILL MAKE IT SLOWER.

Think of it this way: If you buy new clothes and put them in your closet, will it be any harder for you to find a pair of shoes sitting on the floor?

Windows works this way. It knows exactly where every file is on your hard drive. If it is not using a music file, there is NO way for your computer to slow down unless your drive is extreemely full - just like it would slow you down to find the shoes if your closet was extreemely full.

When you hear people say that you need to defrag your drive, what it does is take complete files and put them all together in "contigous space", meaning basically the same place on the disk, so it doesn't have to find part of the file at the beginning of the disk, and the rest of the file at the end of the disk. This "seeking" is what will slow down a computer.

Back to my closet analogy: Your pants and matched shirt are on the same hanger, so you dont have to waste time to look for each.

Defragging: Good thing, and should be done once a month or two anyway. Once a file is defragged, it will not split up again unless you make changes to it and windows cannot find continous drive space for it.

Hope this helps

Answer 5

Hi Molly,

Normally you can't just add multiple processors. There's underlying technology that has to be changed as well. A processor only makes up for part of the performance of a computer. There is a range of components and when one is not sufficient you have what is called a "bottleneck". One of the biggest performace issues is not enough memory (RAM).

People often confuse hard disk space with memory. I often hear people state, "I deleted some files out of my memory and my computer is still slow".

You have to separate these terms. "Memory" should really only relate to RAM and "Storage" should only relate to hard disk space. So what's the difference?

RAM is like a workspace for your computer. The less amount of RAM (memory) the less applications you can have open at the same time. Now the computer will use a portion of your hard disk to act as memory. This is called Virtual Memory and is slower than RAM. Don't confuse this with Hard Disk Storage, just call it Virtual Memory.

When you do not have enough RAM your computer will use the slower Virtual Memory and performance will suffer.

Now back to your question. Simply storing songs on your computer will not affect the performance unless the free Hard Disk Space is less than 200MB and the amount of RAM installed in your computer is less than 512MB.

When that condition exists you simply do not have a good workspace for your computer. To correct that condition you would normally delete some files and add more RAM.

Defragging really only resolves access time problems to your files. When a song or file is written to your hard drive it is written all over the place. Defragging moves the pieces closer together.
This is a small performance increase. A major performance increase is always adding more RAM.

Remember memory typically relates to RAM or Virtual Memory and storage relates to Hard Disk space.

There's more too this and it only gets more confusing so I'll let you with that.

Answer 6

The people who are telling you that your lot of songs will slow it down are getting confused. Your songs are stored on the Hard Disc not the processor. The machine's processor (Celeron or any of the other common types) will run at the same speed as it always did regardless of your music, so playing a song or a game or internet session shouldn't be affected. The main affect of clutter is if the disc is nearly full it will take longer to search for an individual song because it has a lot to search through. A monthly defrag will help a bit. When your hard disc is 85% full buy a bigger disc.

Answer 7

The number of songs and the processor won't effect the speed of the system.

The songs are stored on the hard drive and that's where the problems usually are. A slower system can be the result of many things however, the biggest problem is a fragmented hard drive.

Basically when you delete a file, you don't really delete it, the hard drive just marks that space as usuable. As you keep deleting and adding files bits of the data end up all over the place which results in a slower system. Defragementing the hard drive, realigns all of that data making your system run faster.

Answer 8

If you have the directory separated from your system files, then it will not load it up into memory.
Some Music/song/audio players will load things into memory( as in an entire directory) or if set a particular way, the player will load the music you play into the Music area of Documents. If you check the options on your player, and make sure nothing that references the internet, or your hard disk, is checked, then it should make minimal difference, and should load each song individually.
If you have to, keep the audio on a secondary drive, but do the same checks.
Check the startup options using msconfig ( start, run, then "msconfig", look at startup), and see what loads. Carefully configure your music player, that takes care of that.
Then, check the system path, and thats by Start , run, CMD, trype in path, and see what the PC references, make sure that the path does not reference where your songs are.
After that, you should have no issues. But do keep a Hard Drive with at least 25% of the hard drive space as free, so that the temp file or the "pagesys" file can write freely to it. This is just some basic tips.

Answer 9

That might be at most about 5 Gigabytes of your hard drive space used up by the 1000 songs, so if you have a 30 Gigabyte hard drive with not much else stored on it, you should have at least 10 Gbytes of unused space on the drive now. It would only get to be a problem if you got down to less than 1 Gigabyte or so of free space depending on how your computer is set up.
Some things you need to do periodically to speed up the computer are:
1) Run AdAware freeware from http://www.download.com
2) Run "Registry Mechanic" from http://www.download.com
3) Defragment your hard drive
4) Download, install and use "Quick Start Up" freeware from
http://www.glarysoft.com to turn off any excess start up program icons in your system tray located at the lower right hand corner of your desktop.
5) Finally, you need a minimum of 512 MegaBytes of RAM memory (not your hard drive memory).

Answer 10

Okay...This is a multi answer. With the 1000 songs no it will not make it slower. It would make searching slower and things like that when you are dealing with the folder that contains the tunes. but not the overall operation. As to the double processors...It may increase your overall speed. That would depend on your operating system and the amount of RAM that you have. Most applications can not deal with the twin processors, actual processors not the Hyper Threading. Cheers