Tuneing a Computer

Joes2Silly · Post by **Joes2Silly** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 11:42 am

Well Im on vacation in Florida at my Grandparents house, its cool n fun you know. So my Grandparents have a Compaq computer but its kinda slow, its got a P4, 80 gb hard drive, DVD RW, and 256 MB of RAM that im trying to tune (to make it go faster). Iv already deleted old compressed files and ran ccleaner but I need new ideas. I may not be able to make his hardware run any faster, who knows.......

PS it is runing Windows XP with service pack 2

Post by **bicostp** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 11:48 am

Add more RAM and it will be fine.

My cousin's brand-new-in-December-2005 Dell was crawling, even after I deleted a ton of spyware and a handful of trojan droppers. It's also a P4, but it only has 256 MB of memory. (Running Media Center edition no less).

I consider 256 MB to be the minimum to comfortably work with XP. 512 is recommended, of course more is always better. Get at least a gig, RAM's about the cheapest (and most effective) upgrades you can get for a PC. You're basically trying to keep it from using virtual memory too much.

On a side note, I'm running Fedora Core 5 with a ton of stuff on it on a P3 930 with 512 MB RAM and it runs just fine. (Except the OpenGL screen savers, but that machine has crappy integrated IBM graphics hardware that most small Linux distros won't support. It's a DeskPro EN.)

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 11:55 am

yeah im running xp with 256 right now and its painful at times. i temporarily had 768 in this machine and and ran like a dream... im going to get more ram... some day.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 12:03 pm

timmeh87 wrote:yeah im running xp with 256 right now and its painful at times. i temporarily had 768 in this machine and and ran like a dream... im going to get more ram... some day.

My dad's laptop has 768 ram (128 goes to video), it runs great with a sempron 3100. Our main/family computer has an athlon xp 2100 with 512 ram (want to upgrade to 1280mb, 1 gig+256), and its ok as long as two accounts aren't logged in. The video card also matters, I had intergraded gForce 2 and got a ati 8500 all-in-wonder and its a ton faster with no other changes.

Nonsense Man · Post by **Nonsense Man** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 12:04 pm

Wait where in Florida cause i live in Florida.

Joes2Silly · Post by **Joes2Silly** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 12:33 pm

Panma City Beach (its in the Florida Panhandle

)

sam · Post by **sam** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 12:54 pm

rofl I wouldnt concider running a comp with xp with anything less than 1 gig..

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 12:58 pm

sam wrote:rofl I wouldnt concider running a comp with xp with anything less than 1 gig..

Oops, none of my computers have a gig, and they all run XP ok (could be better).

Big-O · Post by **Big-O** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 1:52 pm

quit screwing around with your grandparents computer.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 4:39 pm

You should try Damnsmalllinux.org on it. It runs from CD, and is really small Linux operating system. Should be a refreshing speed improvement over Windows.

MM007 · Post by **MM007** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 4:48 pm

Damn Small Linux can copy a complete version of itself to RAM if you have 128 MB to fool with, and it is very nice. Basically, if you're going to run Damn Small Linux, I'd put in 128MB plus the RAM for the programs you will be running that aren't part of the DSL's installation package. Of course, the thing comes with Mozzilla Firefox and a bunch of other goodies to begin with.

DSL can run on less than 128 MB fine, but it can't copy the entire OS into RAM and still have enough room for everything else if you have less. You MIGHT be able to squeeze it onto 96 MB, maybe, but 64MB would not be prudent, as the distro size is always just a hair under 50MB. If you want to run Damn Small Linux on less than 96 or 128 MB, it needs to run from the hard drive. It can run from the hard drive with as little as 16MB of RAM, I believe though...

XP's requirements in RAM just seem to keep growing. Perhaps it's because of all the patches and updates. I remember when 128 was sufficient, and you could install it to a computer with 64MB of RAM (Which I did with a P-166MMX. Ran fine on 166...as ong as I didn't tax it too much. I later put in another 16MB to give it 80 MB and it ran fine, but had no updates.)

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 4:57 pm

Disk Defrager, Disk cleanup, update anti-virus, update spyware blocker, update adware blocker. and more ram. There really isn't much you can do with a Windows system to improve the performace, beyond a completely new installation.

XPCportables · Post by **XPCportables** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 5:04 pm

heck, even with one gig windows hurts me, I have 2 installs of XP on my compy, one SP2 and one SP1, the SP1 has ZERO updates, I have never updated it once, and it easily tripples the speed and snap factor of my SP2, and they both have the same programs installed.

project_failure · Post by **project_failure** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 5:09 pm

how many programs are you running in the background. try to limit that.

I havent use Damn Small Linux but i know what it is. I use Knoppix and that can help when you need the computer to work faster.

If you have multiple virus protection programs make sure they are not all running at once becuase that can screw you up big time. same goes for pop blockers and spam blockers.

My step grandma's (or something) computer is so slow sometimes you have to wait ten minutes for the start menu to come up after clicking on it. (I am seriously not exaggerating, ten minutes)

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Jul 11, 2006 7:14 pm

You know because this is on the topic. Whats the run command to enable/disable Windows compoints (like MSN). I know the command "msconfig" and it's not that. I do know that doing this will improve the performace.

Oh and I just remembered a way to speed up a Windows machine. If you have a second/slave drive installed move the Windows paging there. That way if Windows does start using Virtual Memery it wont slow down the speed of the main hard drive.