slowest productivity

[behzad]

Here is the thing. If Xara was multi tasking and used multiple cpu's then I would say yes I need to get a highend system, but it is slow, specially like Rob mentioned it is doing things the other way around. I truly hope that they need to rewrite the whole engine from scratch or something. Xara now for web design will get slower and slower and competition faster and faster.

Acorn I do not think Xara uses any hardware or multi processors so testing it for that is useless, still thanks.

[Chris M]

There's no one answer to your question I'm afraid, we can't know what else your computer is doing in the background. Xara may not utilse multi core (for example) but your com isn't just looking after Xara.

Xara - 'hey, give me a CPU to use' multi core processor - 'sure, use this one, rest of the team carry on doing the other tasks.'
Dual channel RAM. Xara - 'hey I need some RAM' multi channel - 'sure, read with this channel, write with that one.'
NVMe. Xara - 'hey I need to save all this work' - NMVe - 'sure, I can write at about 1,500MB a second'

If you're just thinking about Xara, then RAM and an SSD would be your best bang for bucks, but it isn't the whole story. Sorry to be the bearer of disappointing news.

[handrawn]

following on..

at least 8GB and the fastest processor you can afford

and definately a solid state [SSD] drive, for the system drive at least, both if you use a different drive for active data

the SSD will make a difference, though whether you will notice depends as chris said on what else your computer is doing... but if you use HDD you only are building in slowness from the start; HDD fine for archive and storage, but for running system processess on they are slow in comparison and that slows everything down that cannot be done entirely in RAM which is not as much as you might think [even more important if your RAM is low]

cpuid is useful for monitoring system parameters generally, I use it for keeping an eye on cpu temps when rendering/recoding video which is very system resource heavy.. but of limited use for specific programs, because as said modern windows OS is always running lots of things at once in the background at least

final point: if your SSD is relatively small, and you RAM is high, avoid hibernating the computer, as the hib file will be big and will eat into the SSD free space

[behzad]

THank you Gang, point taken. I appreciate the feedback.