From two minutes and twenty seven seconds to nineteen seconds: A Boot Time Odyssey

[Fumesucker]

2. I'm not that good at staying on top of it, obviously..

But I thought my tale was a dramatic example of how tweaking your computer can make a large difference in your user experience without necessarily spending a lot of money.

My SATA is only 3GB/sec on the motherboard so it's only gonna get so fast..

One of the things I do that eats up drive space and can load the computer down is stacking astronomical images I take with my DSLR, some of mine have been two and three hundred ten megapixel images in RAW format to stack into a single one. That's about the only time the big case fan under the front cover of my box cranks up to the point you can really notice it.

I'll be interested to see how the various astronomical imaging programs I use run now I have the computer tweaked. I have Stellarium in as a Planetarium program and it all but blinks onto the screen now but I haven't installed any serious imaging programs like Iris, Astrostack or Deep Sky Stacker yet. The programs themselves aren't that big but they really massage a lot of data in some fairly intricate ways.