desktop and laptop

Hello,

I have a xp core duo 2 machine at my work with 500mb ram (desktop) and vista
ultimate core 2 duo at home with 1gb ram (laptop).
I use a statistics package for my calculations.
While the comp at my work does the calculations in say 10 seconds, my home
comp does it in 20 seconds.
Where might be the problem?
Why my desktop is faster than my laptop?

thanks in advance for answers.

"minimus" <t24680@hotmail.com> wrote:

> I have a xp core duo 2 machine at my work with 500mb ram (desktop) and vista
> ultimate core 2 duo at home with 1gb ram (laptop).

Memory is dirt cheap these days, I would suggest to upgrade the RAM to
around 2GB or so see if it will help to enjoy the system a little more.

minimus wrote:
> I have a xp core duo 2 machine at my work with 500mb ram (desktop) and
> vista ultimate core 2 duo at home with 1gb ram (laptop).

> I use a statistics package for my calculations.
> While the comp at my work does the calculations in say 10 seconds, my
> home comp does it in 20 seconds.

> Where might be the problem?
> Why my desktop is faster than my laptop?

There could be several reasons:

1) Calculations use a hard drive scratch space and the slower system is
less optimized. Either a slower hard drive, or one that is fragmented,
or both.

2) The processor in your slower machine might be running hot, and the
system is scaling performance back to try to control that.

3) The statistics package is configured differently on the two machines
which directly leads to a performance difference. Or, indirectly causes
a problem by being maladjusted for the operating environment.

4) There is monitoring software, spyware or some other
intentional/unintentional parasite on your system at work that is
slowing *everything* down.

5) If the statistics package is doing a lot of screen updates, a
difference in video adapters can make a tremendous difference. It does
not have to be an application that presents a lot of spectacular
graphics to be affected by this. (For instance, a simple program that
just counts to a million, will be much much slower if it updates a label
to show that count at each step.)

6) Maybe it's memory availability, as you've guessed.

minimus wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a xp core duo 2 machine at my work with 500mb ram (desktop) and
> vista ultimate core 2 duo at home with 1gb ram (laptop).
> I use a statistics package for my calculations.
> While the comp at my work does the calculations in say 10 seconds, my
> home comp does it in 20 seconds.
> Where might be the problem?
> Why my desktop is faster than my laptop?
>
> thanks in advance for answers.
>

In my last response, some of my remarks have confused *which* machine is
slower. Adjust the language, and the speculations should still apply.