Back in the 'windows 10 upgrade still free' thread, I hijacked a good chunk of it with gathering info and advice about video cards & SSD drives and such. I mentioned that I picked up am Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 ti video card and that it 'was like a bolt of lightning' hit my computer. Sadly, turns out that was too close to the truth. At least twice a day the card would freeze the computer. Can't tell you how many jobs I was in the middle of setting up that THAT screwed up. It was in the computer less than 2 weeks, I yanked it an put the old card back in. FWIW it seems these GeForce cards come in many Chinese knockoff versions, pretty sure I got one...

Meanwhile, right between the install and uninstall of the video card, I installed an internal Crucial 1tb SSD. I was expecting a noticeable improvement in overall speed.

umm...a little, maybe-? Just did a fresh boot, which I don't often do. Reason for the reboot- it seems the longer the computer stays on, regardless of programs running, every button click or enter-key response just keeps taking longer, and longer, and longer before the computer responds. Everything that should happen near instantly, has been taking 3 to 8 seconds. I normally do a re-start, this time I did a full shut-down then reboot. Loaded a couple of programs and did a few file-access commands, speed is MUCH better- for now anyway...

So I checked how long to boot: to get just to the 'starting windows' text: 18 seconds. Time to the "welcome" screen, 1:16. Time to my desktop pic and 'the music', 1:25, time to all icons alive and useable, nearly 2 minutes...? I only have 10 basic startup programs active in the MSConfig folder, the only AV/malware program I use is Security Essentials... this is a 64bit 3.16gig 2 Xeon processor 8 core 32gig ram and now SS drive machine. What can possibly be taking this computer a full minute longer to boot than any of my XP's? I don't get it...

And I guess I lied about 'I'll never have a win10 computer'... what I should've said is I'll never BUY or convert to win10 -- One of my customers, who's trying eke a part time self employment living who's not in the best financial straits, gave me an HP laptop, originally a win8 that was converted to 10. She bought a new desktop while a computer shop did the conversion and never used it. Clean hard drive, like new... Well, the thing boots up faster than my 7 here, but that's about the extend of ANY improvement I've found with 10 v 7. It's now a proprietary computer, does nothing but run EzCad and one of my fiber lasers. Slowly.

Maybe I'm asking too much of computers these days, but it's hard not to when my XP's, which admittedly load programs quite a bit slower, do virtually everything else MUCH faster.