Batboard

Hi all and Happy 4th. Have a Dell desktop here that I had upgraded on purchase to 512K RAM. A few years later I notice it gets really sluggish when I'm doing more than one thing at a time, often freezing up. When I run AOL's checkup 255 RAM is being reported, so I lost about half somewhere. Any ideas before I open 'er up and replace the RAM modules ?

Several things worth mentioning.

If you're running WinXP, it runs better with more than 512k memory.

Completely closing all unused applications will free up some memory.

There are programs that utilize memory when they run, but don't give it back when they're done. As you continue to start them, they gobble up available memory until there's none left. Then Windows has to swap stuff between RAM and disk as you try to run things, and that's when your machine gets really slow.

Get rid of unused programs that are "sleeping" in memory. This would include spyware, some viruses, several applications that like to start themselves when your computer boots so they come up faster when you want them. Unfortunately, the tools that are available to help you do this are really oriented towards experts, so I am reluctant to do more than tell you they exist. You can do serious damage with them if you remove too much.

I won't name specific programs because my comments are quite biased, but there are some that tend to take over your machine when installed.

Bob M.

bad power supply. I've seen bad power supplies just eat memory chips right off the board. I had an Athlon Xp 1600 with a gig five in it, and after a while, a bad powersupply just kept cooking RAM chips right off it. I coldn't figure out why all of a sudden the damn thing only showed 384 mb one day, and then i started running memtest 86 on it.

Memtest is a really great little disc to run once in a while for a 12 hour period. It's only a couple of megs to download, and does a fantastically reliable amount of stress to RAM chips on it, to see which ones work and which ones dont. If you know that your powersupply isn't allowing bad power thru (ie it's rather new, and calibrated) then you should run Memtest 86+ for a couple of hours and see if you have a stray bad chip. Highly reccommend it, and it's always been accurate for me. (and it stopped all the phantom lockups on a particually buggy XP machine a year ago!)

For god sakes man lose the AOL.

It would slow or stall a Cray computer.

1st of all...

Do you know how to get into System Properties and see how much RAM windows reports? If not, hold down the Windows key (between Ctrl and Alt) and tap Pause/Break.

If your computer is sharing RAM with the video card, then you'll see 8, 16, maybe even 32MB (MegaBytes!) of ram subtracted from 512MB. THIS IS NORMAL.

If your computer doesn't share ram, then you'll see 512MB.

2nd...

If you see 256MB or (256MB - 8, 16, 32) then it's very likely you installed the new 256MB RAM chip incorrectly, or one of them is dead.

3rd..

Try a RAM checking program like ( http://www.memtest86.com/ ) that will inspect every bit of each RAM chip.

I was given a computer that was pretty good in it's day, but it kept randomly rebooting for no apparent reason. I ran a RAM check program and found that it always reboot the computer then.. swapped ram chips and it didn't. I was able to determine which RAM chip was bad and had me a nice computer after that!

4th...

How many icons are appearing next to your clock? If you have more than 3, you've got too much freakin crap loaded and running on your computer, draining your performance.

Clear out all the crap in your Start > Programs > Startup folder and reboot the computer.

Turn off all the stupid programs like AOL, instant messengers, Anti-Virus that is set to scan constantly will absolutely kill a system (thanks Symantec/Norton!).. and turn off Adobe and RealPlayer and MusicMatch, Winzip etc that load on startup and check for updates.

Use this motto when it comes to programs that load on startup: If I want to use it, I'll open it myself!