Suggestions for CPU upgrade to improve access performance?

[tubbers]

I'm wondering if someone would be able to help me out.

This year's budget allows me to get a new computer and I'm wondering if the size/speed of the processor and amount of RAM would have any affect on Access' performance (speed, etc.)?

I currently am using a Dell Optiplex 170L, Pentium 4 2.80GHz with 512MB of RAM. Win XP Pro and Access 2002. I know that my employers wish to stick with the Dell brand.

One computer they looked at has a dual processor. Would that make a great difference? Or should they spend the money on more RAM?

My knowledge of computer hardware is virutally non-existant so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[mkov]

What you currently have is more than what I develop on, and I would bet more than most have that develop Access applications.

Any time you throw more memory or faster processor at something, it will help the performance.

You should ALWAYS develop all of your apps for the lowest spec computer that it may run on. If you are having problems running your app on your current machine, maybe you should look at the datebase to see why the performance is not there, and not the machine.

 

[tubbers]

Thanks for your advice.

I'm not having problems running my current apps now but my upcoming project is going to have a lot of data processed on a daily basis and will most likely have problems with performance (the app would only run on my machine). I don't know what sort of performance problems I might have as I haven't started working on the project.

 

[BNPMike]

Keep the pc but load as much Ram as you can get in it. I doubt Access can use two processors.

 

[mkov]

Access can not take advantage of multiple processors. SQL Server on the otherhand loves multiple processors.

 

[PHV]

SQL Server on the otherhand loves multiple processors
And MSDE ?

 

[mkov]

MSDE can utilize up to 2 processors and SQL Server can utilize up to 4 processors.

Since I have switched all of my back end databases to SQL Server, I always seem to forget about MSDE.

 

[dilettante]

Is this a single-user database?

With Access, adding more power isn't going to buy you much unless you beef up every computer using it. Of course if you have a slow file server more RAM, etc. will help there - but you'd want to look at your LAN itself and the bandwidth the file server's network adapter(s) can handle.

As always, when you say "Access" you have to consider what you mean. If you have a machine with a Jet database on it and you want to do some heavy crunching against it, dividing up your "crunching" into several separate processes will indeed make some use of additional processors. Each program/script/etc. will get its own instance of Jet that runs on its thread.

 

[willir]

tubbers

Your current PC is fine for running Access XP. You have more than enough processing speed, ram and, although not mentioned, I assume disk space (for temp work area, especially for large quries and reports).

Access, so far, does not support multi-threading, so a second CPU will not help.

Increasing RAM, processing speed, etc will however, allow you to run more applications, faster.

As a priority, I have found memory, RAM, offerring the biggest improvement on performance. My high-end workstations now run with 1 GB of RAM. I do not see a tremendous improvement in performance with processors from 2.1 to 3 GHz.

dilettante is bang-on on the real problem with performance these days -- network infrastructure -- network traffic, network performance, server capacity, speed and performance.

Single user databases can be very useful and powerful, but it is more common to share databases on a network. ...and this is where a database performance will most likely suffer performance problems.

Richard