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I would definitely beef up your RAM. I'll let someone who knows more tell you what to get but I must say that it will improve your system's performance quite a bit. Maybe 1 or 2 gigs of RAM will do nicely.
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"Dear Dr. Bill,
I work with a woman who is about 5 feet tall and weighs close to 450 pounds and has more facial hair than ZZ Top." - Jack The Riffer
"OK, we can both have Ben..joint custody. I'll have him on the weekends. We could go out in my Cobra and give people the finger..weather permitting of course.." -Bill Z. Bub -
Your system is decent, just short on ram.
Get the extra ram like Ben said, but it may be time to wipe the hard drive and start over. Find some sort of a backup drive (a USB drive works nicely), save anything you don't want to loose, and use the Dell restore disk / function key to clear and reload the hard drive.Comment
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256 RAM is SERIOUSLY a problem unless you're running win 95. XP? You'll be bummin a bit. It's pretty cheap these days bro, get 1-2 gig and you'll be amazed at the difference. Just one gig and you'll be stylin'.
There could of course be other issues with adware/scumware etc. And that is something you can address for free with the aforementioned misc software.
Those are two things you really should do.
Then possibly, as mentioned, if there's still issues.... Particularly if you don't have the system seriously customized where it would take forever to dial back in, a reformat is the thing to do. My system takes forever to get back where I want it. Bills, I'm done in a couple hours at the worst. And I've done his MANY times after I built it for him.
Nonetheless, I really recommend more RAM.Comment
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ok heres the deal, I repair computers on the side for people. #1 cause of slow computers is... yup you guessed it a virus has gotten in the system. OK here is the bad news most people dont catch it until years later and it destrys sectors in the hard drive. You need to take out the hard drive and have it tested for bad sectors, then if it is good have them write all 0's on the disk nerd term is called F-Disk. If the hard dive is bad it wont cost anymore than 60 bucks to get a replacement 200gb or 250 gb 8mb cache speed. Yes XP needs a min of 512mb of ram to run properly, I myself have 1.5 gb of ram in my pc and still is quite slow at times. if you need any help pm me and i will give you my number si i can walk you through the reinstall process if you need to go that route....peaCce out BlitZComment
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Everyone had mentioned virii and spyware so I won't elaborate on that.
But one of the absolute worst slow downs on a modern PC is to have DMA disabled on your hard drive controller. There are two ways to interact with IDE devices - Direct Memory Access (DMA) and Programmed Input/Output (PIO). With old ATA drives PIO was usually faster but pretty much any drive made in the last 5-10 years will support Ultra DMA (UDMA) amd that absolutely crushes PIO.
In theory the OS and drivers make this a non-issue and it isn't usually a problem. However, there are circumstances under which Windows will fall back to PIO mode and never reset to UDMA. If this happens to you, your machine will seem to crawl - music playback will stutter, copying files will be grueling, etc.
To check this out, go to the Device Manager - Start | Run | devmgmt.msc - look under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Look at the properties for the various IDE channels listed there. Most will have an advanced tab that shows whether it's running in PIO, UDMA Mode 2,3,4,5 etc. If you have anything running in PIO, your computer will be slow when you access the drive attached to that controller.I want REAL change. I want dead bodies littering the capitol.
- NewcComment
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There's some RAM that should work in your machine.
Also, Start>Run->taskmgr. Go to the Performance tab and look for an entry labeled "Peak". Tell us that number.
Your computer specs aren't too bad except for the RAM, but you would definitely notice a speed increase with a new machine, even one of the $500 Dells.
And Blitz - bad sectors aren't usually caused by viruses; it's usually just the disk going bad. Also, FDisk is for setting up partitions and won't zero out anything. Doing a full format is the only way to do that. To mark bad sectors, Start->Run->cmd, then type "chkdsk /R" and hit enter. It will tell you that a scan can't be run on the system drive and ask you if you want to schedule one for the next boot. Say Yes and restart the computer.Last edited by Spivonious; 03-13-2009, 08:03 AM.ScottComment
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Yep... What he said... ^^^Comment
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Tim...
My Primary IDE is set to:
Auto detect>DMA if available>Ultra DMA Mode 5 (for 0) and Not applicable (for 1)
Where my secondary IDE's are set to:
Autodetect>DMA if Available>Ultra DMA mode2 (for device 0) and Ultra DMA mode 4 (for device 1).
What's the diff? or is there?Comment
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The modes make a huge performance difference. Mode 2 has a maximum transfer rate of 33 MB/sec. Mode 4 is double that and Mode 5 is 100 MB/sec. These days Mode 2 devices are usually CD/DVD drives that can't transfer data any faster.Originally posted by Cleveland Metal View Post
Your Pimary IDE has one very fast drive connected with no secondary drive. I'm guessing that your first device on your Secondary IDE has a CD or DVD drive attached and a hard drive that's slightly slower for the second device.
You will typically get performance on drives by putting faster drives first on an IDE Channel because of the way controllers interact with the first (master) drive on the channel. You may get better performance out of your second hard drive by swapping the order with the CD/DVD drive or putting it on as the second device on your primary channel.I want REAL change. I want dead bodies littering the capitol.
- NewcComment
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Ahh.... well thank you
Duh, I should have looked. The Primary has removable drives and one is pulled right now.
I'll figure the secondary may be both my CD/DVDs
I have an IDE card for my other two hard drives, which probably sucks and is a real bottleneck... And probably arent showing in this hardware view.Comment
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John refomats my shit whenever I watch too much buttporn, and my PC gets all wiggy. That is tech talk baby!!!
Does anyone need advice on ballsack shaving? You gotta be careful or you'll catch the seam. Then you'll have a bunch of little pieces of toilet paper stuck to your sack. That does NOT look good! There's tricks of the trade that I'll share with you..because I care.
Alvin.. dudes..you know I care.
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"Well, your friend would have Bell's Palsy, which is a facial paralysis, not "Balls Pelsy" like we're joking about here." Toejam's attempt at sensitivity.Comment
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Blitz, a virus cannot cause a bad sector on a hard drive. The only way for it to do that is for it to continually fire at the same sector forever hoping to make it turn bad (highly unlikely) or maybe turn the power to your computer on and off sporadically hoping to jar one of the heads. It also cannot mess with a drive's "Low level format" since drives do not use stepper motors to locate tracks anymore. Modern drives locate tracks on the drive based on servo control data permanently written to the drive platters at the factory. There really isn't much a Virus could do except cause you to get mad a kick your PC causing a bad sector on the hard drive.Originally posted by blitz View Post
MattLast edited by OnlineStageGear; 03-13-2009, 10:49 AM.Comment
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Shame on Dell for shipping an XP SP2 machine out with only 256 megs of ram. Even the most stripped down XP installs will gobble up the majority of your 256 megs of ram on bootup. Get yourself a gig of ram. First thing to do is open up the side of your computer case and see if you have 2 slots for ram. I haven't seen a P4 board with only one ram lot, but this is a Dell we are talking about, so anything is possible. Assuming you do have 2 slots, then go into your Bios and see if you have dual channel memory as an option. If you do, get a pair of 512 chips. Pop out your old ram stick and match the speed written on the tag. Probably PC2700 or PC3200.Originally posted by Alvin_Wilson View Post
This is probably what you want.
or
MattComment
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