What could be wrong??

**ilovetheusers** · July 6th, 2004, 03:46 PM

I don't do a lot of support for people in their homes but a customer from the petshop who I think is a decent person grabbed me and made me take a look at her PC to see what kind of issues are plaguing it.

Fixed a few minor issues like setting up e-mail from the ISP in OE, showed her how to copy, cut and paste, use word a bit better, get sound to work, etc. Started troubleshooting her slowness issue and looked at the stats on the side of the box to see a 1800 xp chip resdided in this compaq. Why the heck is it so dog slow? Oh, it's got 128mb of RAM with only 112mb free after video takes it's share. The swapfile is set to a max of 248mb. It's running XP, NAV 2003 at startup and there is zero memory available for anything to operate.

How did machines get built or still get built with less than 128mb of RAM when they run XP? This was a compaq BTW. I'm not loving Compaq but OMG this was the worst performance I've ever seen from a PC. I've built PC-chips machines that were better.

**NooNoo** · July 6th, 2004, 03:51 PM

Medion.... 96mb ram on a lappie running xp with norton on an sis chipset.... I think I got you beat!

**GrandDad** · July 6th, 2004, 03:52 PM

A lot of them coming out before only had 128mb , cheaper to sell ya_know .

**arch0nmyc0n** · July 6th, 2004, 06:27 PM

I had winxp running on a pentium 233MMX with 96 MB of the old 72pin EDO ram... booted faster with XP than it used to with 98... was fine getting around... didn't have Norton installed tho...and besides... 128mb with 32 shared is FINE for XP.... so long as you don't plan to install anything else..

**Stalemate** · July 6th, 2004, 08:40 PM

233MMX also, 128Mb RAM, but... on a laptop.

I also observed gains in overall speed and performance.

It started as a joke, but we ended up keeping WinXP on there after all.

Weird.

**Ya_know** · July 6th, 2004, 08:42 PM

Originally Posted by GrandDad

A lot of them coming out before only had 128mb , cheaper to sell ya_know .

I'll have you_know that I am worth a little more than that... :butt:

**GrandDad** · July 6th, 2004, 09:11 PM

Originally Posted by Ya_know

I'll have you_know that I am worth a little more than that... :butt:

Well I'll have to check my fact's and figure's to see if you add-up or not .

**ShadowWynd** · July 7th, 2004, 05:03 AM

I came across Win2000 running on 40Mb of RAM the other day - worked OK until you tried to run anything else.

**freddy** · July 7th, 2004, 05:08 AM

look below ,,,it says "reqires a pentium processor of 166 or greater"

**Ya_know** · July 7th, 2004, 06:51 AM

Freddie, my eyes hurt...if you say that's what it says, I'm gonn'a have to trust you...

**freddy** · July 7th, 2004, 06:58 AM

Originally Posted by Ya_know

Freddie, my eyes hurt...if you say that's what it says, I'm gonn'a have to trust you...

actual wording "windows XP reqires a pentium or later prossesor" ,,,,,dammed thing was an AMD!!!!!!

**ilovetheusers** · July 7th, 2004, 09:21 AM

Oddly, I had a 233mhz with 128mb that was running just as fast as this thing was.

Oh, I forgot to mention that they had an HP all in one scanner, coppier, printer attached as well.

Those things are bigger RAM eaters than XP is.

Anyway, I think she's going to buy the 512mb upgrade stick I told her she could use.

**Major Kong** · July 7th, 2004, 07:21 PM

ILTU I had the same thing happen up here several weeks back with a co-workers PC at home. It was a Gateway Performance 800 PC with a PIII 800 Mhz CPU, 64 meg of PC 100 RAM

and assorted antique odds and ends. It was running Windows ME, but they were wanting to upgrade to XP-Pro. The PC was slower than a watchin' cleetus cypherin' 3 digit prime numbers!

Finally I was able to convince them what needed to be done and put in 512 meg of RAM. The performance improved dramatically and XP loaded up without a hitch.

**Radical Dreamer** · July 8th, 2004, 08:18 PM

I cant imaging only having 128mb of ram, hell my video card has 2X that. I'll keep my 2GB dual channel DDR 400 anyday

**ClickHere2Surf.com** · July 9th, 2004, 09:32 AM

All the Compaqs I've had all had Bigfoot hard drives, which are by FAR the slowest and noisiest hard drives ever made. Any computer with a bigfoot will run slow as hell even if it had 3+ghz cpu.

I changed the hard drive in my Compaq (many years ago befire I learned I could build a 10x better PC for 1/2 the price) to a maxtor ata100 7200 and it was at least 20 times faster.

I did the same for my dad's compaq, it used to take 1-2 hours to convert a CD to mp3, after I changed the hard drive it took about 10 minutes.

Opposite to what most typical users think, for most things the hard drive has a much bigger impact on performance than the CPU. A 200mhz CPU with a RAID 0 SATA would run miles faster than a 3 ghz with an ata33 4000rpm hard drive. Of course some things like frame rate smoothness for videos/games are more afected by the CPU (and video card) but for loading programs/files the hard drive is what affects performance the most, since it is after all the bottleneck in a PC.