My housemate runs Windows 7 on the following: C2Q 8400 8gig Samsung EVO 840 120gig He has a bunch of storage HDDs attached and uses uTorrent heavily. He says the system is becoming slow with browsing, general Windows usage, but especially when uTorrent is running (he does A LOT of seeding - over fibre). The HDD where he currently has his main download directory is from 2009 and is making noises like it might be struggling. I'm wondering how much difference a cheap upgrade will make. Any ideas? I'm wondering if the following individual changes would make a difference: 1) Replacing the ancient HDD? 2) Clean Windows install? 3) Moving to DDR3? 4) Moving to SATA III for both his SSD and a potential new HDD? Looking at benches, a C2Q 8400 would be beaten by a current Pentium, but not by loads and he'd lose 2 cores. That said, he doesn't game or work. It's a glorified media box with a browser basically. Would love your thoughts, as even a cheap CPU, RAM, mobo, HDD combo will run £250. Thanks.
Replace a his HDD with one or two new HDD. I recently bought two 3tb Toshiba drives. If the SSD is sata 3 it could benefit from sata 3.if not it won't. RAM speed is unimportant. Clean windows install could help as well. Overclock if he hasn't already
