Crafthor

Prominent
Jul 7, 2019
9
1
515
I work in a schools IT dep and am trying to see if I can juice out a bit more speed out of these 6.5 year old machines some of the classrooms still have.
Specs:
os: win 10 education or 8.1 education
cpu: i5-3570S (with integrated graphics)
ram: 4gb ddr3
ethernet controller : Integrated Intel® 82579LM Ethernet LAN (Gigabit)
HDD: either 250gb or 500gb WD black 7200rpm

My main problem with these is the harddrive maxes out at 5ish MB/s anytime a student tries to load into their account on it or do something of similar complexity. Student accounts are 1gb on average. The switches and the wiring we have in the school are recent and are capable of gigabit speeds. The harddrives in the computers are also for the most part recent and should work much faster than this.
I tired wiping them and reinstalling our preconfigured image for them. (It helped for 1 or 2 weeks then the computer returns to its 5+ minute loading times)
I tired installing a clean up to date image from the Microsoft website. (Same effect)
Still the speed of the drive becomes unbearably slow anytime the computer starts doing something more complex than internet browsing or reading a single file.

My thoughts on the most likely cause are either the motherboards are too slow for their gigabit ethernet controllers or the sata bus connected to the hdd slot is slow.

So, is there anything i could do to try to make it faster or are these computers a lost cause at this point?
 
Solution
should take one of the 4GB sticks from another system and throw it into one of them to upgrade it to 8GB temporarily and see if the extra RAM helps.

Before you do that though go into Windows power settings and change the profile to high performance and see if that does anything.

QwerkyPengwen

Splendid
Ambassador
should take one of the 4GB sticks from another system and throw it into one of them to upgrade it to 8GB temporarily and see if the extra RAM helps.

Before you do that though go into Windows power settings and change the profile to high performance and see if that does anything.
 
Solution

Crafthor

Prominent
Jul 7, 2019
9
1
515
should take one of the 4GB sticks from another system and throw it into one of them to upgrade it to 8GB temporarily and see if the extra RAM helps.

Before you do that though go into Windows power settings and change the profile to high performance and see if that does anything.

Tried replacing ram to high performance 8gb ram already. Replaced hdd with ssd too.
Didn't change anything.
I will try the high performance thing, thank you!