For What It's Worth,

My box is an older Dell Optiplex 745 also. While your cpu is faster than my cpu, otherwise our boxes are similar in that I am running 2GB of ram and have an 80 GB hard drive. I'm still running XP while your operating system is Win 7.

In my opinion the 80 Gig hard drive is your biggest issue. At the very least you'll find you need to defrag and optimize often. Once the free drive space is 50% or less you'll find it takes FOREVER to defrag and it won't help to restore performance as much as it did when the drive was new and almost empty.

The time to buy DDR2 memory has passed. Your motherboard may hold 8 GB (4 2 GB memory sticks) but the 32 bit Win 7 will only use 4 GB. DDR-2 memory costs about twice as much as current generation DDR-3 memory. All memory prices will rise around November as DDR-4 production ramps up.

A 500 GB hard drive is about $60 while a 1 TB hard drive is between $70 to $90. 500 GB hard drive prices have stabilized, 1 TB drive prices have almost bottomed out while 2 TB and higher capacity drive prices continue to drop.

I suggest either replacing the 80 GB drive with a 500 GB or 1 TB drive, adding a second hard drive or both.

If you upgrade the primary drive the computer will have more free space to work with so it won't have to work as hard performing background housekeeping tasks. The bad news is you will have to clone your old drive to the upgraded drive. We can advise on that or you can pay to have it done.

If you add a second drive you can shift a lot of stuff from the primary drive to the secondary drive so the primary drive doesn't get used as much or fill up as fast. BiaB will also load a little faster from an internal drive than through a usb port plus you can open up two usb spaces.

Hope this gives you food for thought. My projects are small so my computer doesn't have to work too hard over extended periods.

Jim Fogle - 2024 BiaB (1111) RB (5) Ultra+ PAK
DAWs: Cakewalk by BandLab (CbB) - Standalone: Zoom MRS-8
Laptop: i3 Win 10, 8GB ram 500GB HDD
Desktop: i7 Win 11, 12GB ram 256GB SSD, 4 TB HDD
Music at: https://fogle622.wix.com/fogle622-audio-home