Fix Windows 10 Slow Rename/Delete

Posted on October 18, 2020 by pixelworkbench

When I installed Windows 10 on one of my LGA775 machines, the first thing that immediately annoyed me was that the PC seemed slow and unresponsive. And this was with a 3GHz quad core processor, 8GB RAM, and running off an SSD. Gaming and application performance was ok, and benchmarks returned expected results, but simple tasks like renaming a new folder or deleting items were unbearingly slow. And in fact, when looking at the Task Manager, it showed that Explorer actually became unresponsive for a few seconds when renaming or deleting files. Continue reading →

Matrox G200 crashing or freezing in 3D games

Posted on December 21, 2019 by pixelworkbench

I spent a good part of a day wrestling with an annoying problem I found while testing the Matrox G200 AGP graphics card I recently acquired on my Pentium 4 test machine. And it’s a quite serious problem – it causes a BSOD or a hard lockup/freezing in 3D games under Windows 98 SE, Continue reading →

AOpen MX46-533V: SIS 651 review

Posted on December 15, 2019 by pixelworkbench

AOpen MX46-533V

Recently picked up an inexpensive mATX motherboard for testing AGP graphics cards – the AOpen MX46-533V. The specs are pretty good for its intended purpose – socket 478 for cheap Pentium 4 cpu’s, up to 533MHz FSB support, DDR333 memory support, Universal AGP, and drivers ranging from Windows 98 SE and NT4 to Windows XP. There’s even an integrated graphics unit Continue reading →

AMD FX 8350 vs Modern Games

Posted on April 6, 2019 by pixelworkbench

AMD FX 8350

AMD FX processors often get laughed at as AMD’s “Netburst moment” based on their inferior performance and efficiency compared to the competition from Intel. But unlike Intel’s Netburst abomination, Continue reading →

Intel Sandy Bridge – Gaming in 2018

Posted on April 6, 2019 by pixelworkbench

Xeon e5 1660

When it comes to Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors, there are two kinds of people. Those who are happily running one since the year 2011, laughing at how little incentive they have to upgrade to something newer. And those who did not buy one in 2011, Continue reading →

Pentium 4 Performance with SDR vs DDR memory

Posted on April 6, 2019 by pixelworkbench

Pentium4 sdr ddr memory

In the autumn of 2001, my parents finally decided to buy a new family computer, to replace the ancient Pentium 120 laptop my family was using up to that point. Unfortunately, the fall of 2001 was a crappy time to be buying a PC. Continue reading →

Can you game on Ati 3300 integrated graphics?

Posted on August 4, 2018 by pixelworkbench

Ati 3300 graphics

In 2008, AMD released the 790GX chipset that included the most powerful integrated GPU at the time – the Ati 3300. Which had nothing to do with my plans. I already had a gaming rig with a socket 939 AMD Opteron 165 cpu, the hugely popular Geforce 8800gt video card, and life was good. But as more demanding games appeared Continue reading →