HD Tune – Fabulous Windows Hard Drive Testing Software!

Recently I tested a number of my older Windows machines with HD Tune. It’s fabulous performance testing software!

HD Tune

HD Tune tests the slowest part of any computer. The hard drive.

If you have seen my database tuning presentation, you will know that it always amazes me why so many developers don’t realize that the hard drive is the slowest part of any system, and look to remove lines of code that run in memory. Sometimes only once! Duh!

What was really interesting was the the hard drives of three of my old machines ran at an average speed of 20, 50, and 70 megabytes per second. But one machine was running at less than 10 megabytes per second! It confirmed what I knew; that computer was really slow.

HD Tune is fast, easy and intuitive. Reading manuals is not required. Installs in one motion. Only works on Windows though.

The other really good testing software I’ve used is Passmark, that I reviewed previously.  Although, by just looking at the hard drive, HDTune seems to approximate the entire performance pretty closely.

Now, should I just get some solid state drives? Or just buy some new computers? Hmm.

Do check it out!

Safari and Gmail on Windows: Lots of CPU

Recently, I’ve noticed that when I use the Safari browser on XP for Gmail, it takes up a LOT of my machine’s CPU.

Around 50%!

This is not just when I’ve opened Gmail. It is a number of minutes after. And it will go on for a number of minutes.

What is going on here?

On the machine I’m concerned about, I’m using:
Safari 5.0.2
Windows XP
Gmail