Looking for a program to test system performance?

I'm thinking of doubling my laptop's ram, switching to SSD for main (OS) hard drive, and perhaps also giving eBoostr software a(nother) shot (it's program that supposedly boosts system responsiveness, especially if you have extra ram to spare).

I'd like to do a proper test of the system before and after, for example, by playing HD video while running some resource intensive video conversion program and launching a bunch of time consuming programs like Microsoft Word, Photoshop, GIMP, booting a small VM, and so forth. If you know of good tools for timing program launches and measuring other tasks please recommend them.

 

maybe sys sandra or aida64 and its benchmarking tools

 

PCMark7 does simulate the harddrive accesses of a whole bunch of known software, and is therefor a very good benchmark giving you scores that are most comparable by the real-life speedups you will notice.

 

PCMark7 looks promising. Would the basic (free) edition that offers their base PCMark Test be enough? (The professional edition costs 2300 €).

I found another freebie program called Passmark AppTimer. It's nice but very basic.

I have AIDA64 installed and it's excellent for system information, but the benchmarking tools seem to be designed for hardware testing, whereas I want to test program and system responsiveness. i.e. do programs launch quicker, does the computer boot and shutdown quicker, can it handle simultaneous tasks quicker and more smoothly (play video without skips/freezes while processing photos or doing a video conversion in the background).

I haven't used SiSoft's Sandra, but my understanding is that it is similar to AIDA64 in that is mainly for hardware testing and info.

 

The free Basic Edition should be enough, you don't have the option to specifically test for large uncompressable data only or heavily fragmented data only, you only have the complete test in the basic version which should be enough to give you a clear idea of the performance overall. Since you don't update the CPU, don't expect life changing improvements in things like video conversion etc... these thing mainly stress the cpu, adding a SSD will tackle the achiles heel of 99% of todays systems, that is the Disk IO bottleneck.