Hello all, i have just been to my gf's grandma's house to fix her pc. I have sorted the usual stuff deleting virus check etc, but the pc still runs slow, i dunno if i am right or not but is 256mb ram (pc3200 400mhz) not enough for Xp? It's stupidly slow and annoying. I think i know 256mb is too weak for xp because Xp takes all of the 256mb up straight away. I am thinking about throwing the 256mb out and getting 2x512mb pc3200 ram for about £10ish and putting that in.
XP needs 512mb only if you're running games and such on it, otherwise it's a waste of time. But I've had XP running just fine on a PIII 500mhz laptop with only 128mb of ram. It depends on what sort of background processes she is running. Also check the amount of available hard drive space left, it's a general rule that you should have at least 3gigs free for file swap space. Check the amount of virtual memory the OS has assigned to the PC, assigning more may speed up the PC. Although another 256/512mb of ram wouldn't hurt, you can pick it for next to nothing these days if you know the right people.
Yh, her gran hardly uses the pc but when she does it's a tad slow. She has like 80gb on her HDD. I know xp was slow on my lappy which had 256mb and a AMD athlon 2600+ barton. So will more ram help it out? well tbf the pc reads only 198mb, but it is 256mb ram because i checked on cpu-z. Is there anyway of making it 256mb instead of it readin 198mb? Edit How do you see how much virtual memory it has and how do you increase it? Thanks for the help =]
Hi. First, if Gram has integrated graphics on the motherboard. then part of her memory is being shared AND owned by the graphics chip. You can't do anything about that. In my old yet humble opinion, 512MB is the BARE MINIMUM you need to have to get XP to run, barely! All of our systems here have 2 GB of Ram. You should NOT expect more than a crawl with 256 or 512 MB of memory. The least anyone with XP should run is 1 GB of Ram. What processor does she have ?
She does have a onboard gcard, i should have thought about that before meh. But she has a AMD sempron 1.8ghz. I used to have 512mb and it was fine to css etc but i have to agree when I installed an extra 512 alt tabbing was faster xD
so, Gram is running a socket 462 board (guessing), the sempron has, what, 128MB L2 Cache (check CPU-Z again)? Crap, do a total of 1GB (I prefer to break the Ram up, so 2 x 512 MB will do), of the fastest ram her mobo can handle. She'll leave everything to you !! My wife has an asus sckt 462, running DDR 400. Nice and peppy. Also has 2 gigs of ram, but she does Graphics work on it.
I just noticed your edit. Swap file / paging file, same thing. Windows allocates it depending on your system ram, usually. BUT, the MORE memory onboard, the LESS the computer will use the swap file, which is really just space on the hard drive. THAT is why it will fly after it has 1GB Memory. Not to sound rude, I'm concerned with safety, so don't try to adjust the swap file until you can find out where to adjust it on your own. This setting can thrash your Windows if you screw it up. But, its up to you. Remember, by adding more RAM, you will make it less likely that windows needs the swap file. My diagnosis is that with the memory amount she has available to Windows, her programs are constantly accessing the only hard drive she has. Making for a slow and unhappy computing experience.
Yh cheers, i was guessing so. So i'll probs look out for some cheap 2x512mb pc3200 ram on ebay or forums xD. Her ram is 256mb pc3200 which is alright part from it aint enough .
Interesting opinion, although 512mb is a recommended for XP. Bare minimum would be 64mb, since such a title as bare minimum would entail that it only just gets the system running. I remember back in the day when 512mb was alot of memory, and it allowed you to played battlefield 1942 really well on XP as opposed to having 256mb. I think you're just going overboard with 1024mb of ram. XP is 7 years old, it doesn't require a super computer to run.
Not just opinion, we benchmarked a test system, and brought all our Company PC's to 1GB (768 MB on the older systems), based on the results. The graphics users got more memory and more powerful graphics cards, but it still followed the curve after installation. With Gram's onboard graphics, she needs a bit more oomph, plus that Sempron has almost NO L2 cache. On older stuff, well, I grew up on it. I am old.
well as stated above it would be better to have 1gb because the onboard gcard is taking some of memory for its own use.
have you also tried disabling unnecessary startup programs and services? i have used xp on a 256mb memory machine w/ onboard video before and it's not as slow as you describe it.