>>I am starting to spend a lot more time in Visual Studio 2012 and am already growing aggravated with the unbelievably slowness, especially when it loads. This machine has an AMD Phenom II X4 820 processor running at 2.80 GHz with 6 GB of memory, lots of free space on the hard drive. Can anyone recommend a machine that will make VS run like greased lightning? Everything else I use runs with acceptable speed.
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>>Thanks in advance for any advice, especially if you are a VS 2012 user.
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>I've seen some computers running a complete antivirus/security suite such as Norton/Symantec, plus one or more extra utilities such as Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, SuperAntiSpyware etc. That combination can reduce disk performance to a crawl. In those cases I recommend removing all security software except the suite.
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>If the suite is anything other than Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender, it might be worth turning off real-time scanning temporarily to see what effect that has on performance.
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>You could also do a general cleanup i.e. go through the list of running processes (ProcessExplorer is great for that), and uninstall/remove any bloatware or crapware. If you have a consumer machine from a major OEM such as HP, Toshiba, Sony etc. it's probably got a lot.

Thanks, Al. Good stuff. Trying to discern what I can delete and what I can't makes me a little leery but I suppose I can create a restore point before starting.