The overall computer’s performance doesn’t depend on just the CPU or RAM alone. You can have the a lot of RAM with the fastest CPU but if you have a hard drive that is not capable of keeping up with the speed, the whole performance gets degraded. Many years ago, whenever I help someone to build a computer, I would make sure that they would at least get a 7200RPM hard drive instead of the “standard” 5400RPM. It cost slightly more but the speed improvement is noticeable. As for now after installing Corsair Force SSD hard drive on my laptop, I find it hard to tolerate the slowness of 7200RPM hard drive that is on my desktop 😛
When your computer is performing very slowly but you find that the CPU usage and memory usage are not hitting the roof, then most of the time it is your hard drive that is being maxed out. One very good tool to confirm that is by using Drive Speedometer. Drive Speedometer is a simple and small utility created by Shane from PcWinTech (the same author who created CleanMem) that lets you monitor your hard drive’s read and write speed.
Drive Speedometer effectively shows you the current read and write speed of your hard drive. As you can see from the screenshot below, the SSD hard drive on my laptop has an excellent 71MB read and 56MB write.
But when it comes to the normal 7200RPM hard drive, it maxed out at a pathetic 10MB read and 10MB write.
This is a very simple straight forward program that uses the Windows performance counters to pull the information. If Drive Speedometer doesn’t work, probably you have Windows performance disabled and you can easily re-enable it back by running the provided enable_performance_counters.reg file.