Hey seasoned - or any other computer geek

Early reports for 10 v 8 said the software is pretty much tied in speed performance, no better, no worst. Accessing to load up titles for use is another thing. Spec on the hardware on the machines I would look at is to make certain your I5 processor is 4th generation. If the I7 is a 4th too then that's puzzling. If the I5 is 5th generation and the I7 is 4th then not so surprising perhaps.

With that amount of ram I don't think 16 gigs would be taxed so having 32 gigs would not be that much of an advantage for low end work. Is the I5 ram a faster ram than the I7 ram though?

Despite higher spin speeds, what is the seek time on the two hard drives? That could make a difference, Is the I5 one also a much smaller one in capacity, perhaps that makes a difference as well.

This from a forum, perhaps a valid point: "a newer 5400 rpm drive may well be faster for most things generally than an older 7200 rpm drive."

Software wise, are you running different virus killers or programs of that ilk or not at all. Are you running Cortana on Ten.

Just a few things that came to mind.

Some thoughts on 10 and it's behavior, this goes with the net and programs. It can take a little longer or has done but once it does, it's all there be it programs or web pages, subsequent loads are faster, perhaps a little caching there. Also The Fast Start of Windows feature. Is yours swicthed on or off?

Added, Fast start is on by default but I had some problems re-launching programs and browsers having closed them, switched it off, machine takes a little longer to start up now (still fast) but performance is excellent, no more problems.

I'm going to guess it is operating system related.

I am not a windows person, but I know that with my Mac after a particular update things went to absolute slow down on firing up my computer. And I proceeded to add more ram, replaced hard drive cables 2x, replaced and upgraded hard drive 2x (this was all within 3 months).

Found forums with others having same kinds of issues.

My sister just got windows 10 too, and she is not all that happy with it so far. But her old computers are so old she was trying to just make sure she had stuff up to date for her business.

She still uses the old computers more and the older software in them as well as it does stuff better than the new ones.

I've been solely laptop reliant for the past 9 years, and I keep my old software at this point to use for a lot of things in the old laptops.

Upgrading used to be fun and exciting - and now it's a pain in the arse as well as more expensive. Flipping software companies got smart and now make you have to buy and pay regularly for use of a lot of things.

That suggest to me that there is a lot less running on the i5 in the background than there is on the i7,

3 seconds is pretty spiffy for any recent version of After Effects.

Did you tweak your virtual memory settings? 32 gigs of ram I would turn virtual memory off entirely unless you do video editing. (I run 32gb with it off and do video eiditing, I only get the out of memory error once, while trying to render some 3d stuff and I'm pretty sure the program actually crashed. I realize that editing lengthy 1080p clips, or 4k then 32gb is not enough.) If you get an SSD in there it should be pretty fast. SSD is the single biggest performance improvement you can do to your PC for most applications.

Tip: If you get an SSD, I recommend Intel SSDs. I had a bunch of problems with other manufacturers. I realize they're not as fast, but would you rather have silly fast and reliable or warp speed and problems? Especially on a disk with your OS on it ...

Also, if drive indexing still exists in win10, turn that crap off immediately unless you actually use it. If you do not use the search feature in windows, it just wastes hard drive cycles for nothing. I use Ultra File Search anyways (freeware.)

I'm still running win7 on everything I do work on, I have a win10 laptop for jerking around on sites like failblog.com during "off time."

Virtual memory is quite possibly the stupidest thing ever created by Microsoft. Edit: no the windows registery is, nevermind. /endedit If you don't have the memory to run an application, windows should just tell you that you need more memory. There's just so much BS that goes on with virtual memory. If your system crashes windows has to "fix" the swapfile and then windows takes 5 minutes to load. If there's issues with the swapfile while allocating a bunch of memory it has to do a bunch of "stupid bullshit." Windows seems to prioritize the swap file over just using real memory sometimes, (especially prior to win7.) If your OS is on the same drive as your swapfile (99% of people) when windows needs to swap to the file, it's usually reading from the same disk, this causes massive lag loading applications. I just hate it completely. I've had it turned off for 7-8 years now.

Well, I always HATED windows, for a LOT of reasons. Even the GOOD ideas, like VM and shareable libraries, were done with PITIFULLY little thought. SERIOUSLY, they were at least 34 years old when M/S wanted to implement them, but windows basically tried to do them from SCRATCH. And don't get me started about the whole idea of abandoning any old cell based functionality.

Anyway, the more recent O/S, ESPECIALLY WINDOWS, tend to use more memory, and windows uses a lot of disk. This means that in many cases of commercial use, a lot of the CPU is hampered. That explains why even the SLOWEST parts of CPUs today are over 10 times as fast, and you don't see that kind of speedup in the UI. Of course features like Aero ALSO slowed things down. Another feature that used MORE MEMORY, MORE CPU, and MORE TIME, just to LOOK NICER!

OH, and i5, i7, etc... Mean even less now than they once did. It USED to be that a new member in a given family would generally scale up with the clock speed. If you could double the clock speed, the CPU performance would be doubled. NOW, with pipelines, cache, cache level, multipliers, threads, etc.... even the SAME processor running at twice the clock speed probably won't go twice as fast.

Still, the internal characteristics are often tweaked, and different generations can have very different performance characteristics. So it IS possible for the generation to make a BIG internal difference.

THEN, you can look at the buss and all. Some may have a different buss, with different characteristics, and different memory. All of THAT can make a big external difference.

As for the drive? The faster drive ONLY means that it is mechanically easier to read the entire track quicker. If you can not read the next block quick enough. the faster drive may actually be SLOWER! This is why many disks, at least historically, have been interleaved. ALSO, the SEEK time could be slower, and this affects the time to read info that is NOT on the same track. There is also the PLATTER COUNT! People speak a lot about track and efficiency. REALLY, the key is the CYLINDER and efficiency. If the 5400 had the SAME size track, and three times as many platters, and both were 100% efficient, reading in sequence, the 5400 would be over TWICE as fast.

Of course you DO leave off a lot of info. ANOTHER important part on the disk drives is the interface and ITS version. If the drives had different caches and interfaces, THAT could explain a lot. On windows, that affects a LOT.

As for rendering, if you are talking about graphic rendering, even the graphics card can make a BIG difference. Some cards are just simple interfaces, and some are almost like computers in themselves.

Steve