About a year ago, my sister bought a new computer from Dell. It has
a Pentium 4 processor running at about 3 GHz, but I noticed that the
hard drive is churning a lot whenever any program is launched. In fact,
it churns a LOT. The system seems rather sluggish because of this, and
takes much longer to do much of anything than my 3 year old Sempron
based Compaq. (running at about 2 GHz)

I checked out the memory, and found that they are running Windows XP
with only 512 MB of RAM. I looked up info on the motherboard, and it is
limited to installing two 512 MB sticks of DDR1 RAM.

This reminded me of an old ISA card with memory that I remember
seeing once. You could just add memory to your system by plugging the
card in.

Do they make anything like that on PCI cards these days, or maybe
something like a riser card that would let me add 4 GB of DDR2 RAM to
their system or anything? It seems silly to have such a fast system
that is horribly crippled by only being able to accept DDR1 RAM, and
only up to 512 MB dimms at that.

Thanks! I'm hoping there is some way around the memory limitation.

OhioGuy <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> About a year ago, my sister bought a new computer from Dell. It has
> a Pentium 4 processor running at about 3 GHz

> I checked out the memory, and found that they are running Windows XP
> with only 512 MB of RAM. I looked up info on the motherboard, and it is
> limited to installing two 512 MB sticks of DDR1 RAM.

What model Dell is it?

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley
Linux User: #370818 http://markhobley.yi.org/

On Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:27:11 -0500, OhioGuy <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> About a year ago, my sister bought a new computer from Dell. It has
>a Pentium 4 processor running at about 3 GHz, but I noticed that the
>hard drive is churning a lot whenever any program is launched. In fact,
>it churns a LOT. The system seems rather sluggish because of this, and
>takes much longer to do much of anything than my 3 year old Sempron
>based Compaq. (running at about 2 GHz)
>
> I checked out the memory, and found that they are running Windows XP
>with only 512 MB of RAM. I looked up info on the motherboard, and it is
>limited to installing two 512 MB sticks of DDR1 RAM.
>
> This reminded me of an old ISA card with memory that I remember
>seeing once. You could just add memory to your system by plugging the
>card in.
>
> Do they make anything like that on PCI cards these days, or maybe
>something like a riser card that would let me add 4 GB of DDR2 RAM to
>their system or anything? It seems silly to have such a fast system
>that is horribly crippled by only being able to accept DDR1 RAM, and
>only up to 512 MB dimms at that.
>
> Thanks! I'm hoping there is some way around the memory limitation.

"newer" PC with P4 3Ghz? Should be a refurb, or surplus, or
something. The box I have at work is a 2004-ish HP, and it has that
P4 3 GHz - Northwood with dual channel DDR, but it has 3GB installed -
4 slots, 2x512 sticks, 2x1GB sticks. Yours should take 1GB sticks -
the chipset would, unless Dull screwed you up by BIOS or some other
dirty trick they're known for. Don't cry about the old sticks - just
chuck them. Last time I looked up at pricewatch, 1GB sticks (no-name
PC3200) start at $13, free delivery. 2GB total should be more than
enough for anything, unless your sis runs some especially memory
hungry stuff like server apps or (Cough!) Vista.

NNN

OhioGuy wrote:
> About a year ago, my sister bought a new computer from Dell. It has a
> Pentium 4 processor running at about 3 GHz, but I noticed that the hard
> drive is churning a lot whenever any program is launched. In fact, it
> churns a LOT. The system seems rather sluggish because of this, and
> takes much longer to do much of anything than my 3 year old Sempron
> based Compaq. (running at about 2 GHz)

Sounds like she's infected with adware, viruses, or other junk. A better
way to recover the lost performance is to back up all of her data to
another hard disk or on DVDs and do a complete reformat and reinstall of
operating system.

> I checked out the memory, and found that they are running Windows XP
> with only 512 MB of RAM. I looked up info on the motherboard, and it is
> limited to installing two 512 MB sticks of DDR1 RAM.

Well go to www.crucial.com or www.kingston.com, and enter that PC's
model number into their online lookup system, and they'll tell you what
the limit of that machine actually is. They will either confirm the Dell
documentation, or give you a larger limit. With DDR1, you should
typically be able to increase a two-slot memory bank upto 2GB.

But really, it's not a good solution to increase memory. If the machine
is infected with malware they will just take whatever memory you got and
use it all up again. The better solution is to just eliminate the
malware first.

> This reminded me of an old ISA card with memory that I remember seeing
> once. You could just add memory to your system by plugging the card in.

Old, old days, no longer exists today. Today RAM is so fast that even
putting memory on a PCIe card would be considered a severe hobbling of
its performance.


Yousuf Khan