128 Meg of ram on XP?

[the staring frogs of Southern Iberia]

My brother in law is convinced he's got a virus or somethings wrong with his
computer. After running Belarc Adviser to see what his computer was made up
of it shows he's only got 128 Mg of ram. I d'loaded AVG, Adaware and Spybot
to clean it up ( he did have a virus and bunches of malware) but the box is
painfully slow. Applications take so long to load it's a chore even working
on it. Will XP even function on 128, I told him I thought the minimum was at
least 256 if not more. He has room for 2 more sticks ( 2 empty slots) and
can max it out at something like 792 according to Crucial.

 

[PD43]

Will XP even function on 128, I told him I thought the minimum was at
least 256 if not more.

It will ABSOLUTELY SUCK with that little RAM.

Upgrade his computer to as much as it will take.

 

[philo]

My brother in law is convinced he's got a virus or somethings wrong with his
computer. After running Belarc Adviser to see what his computer was made up
of it shows he's only got 128 Mg of ram. I d'loaded AVG, Adaware and Spybot
to clean it up ( he did have a virus and bunches of malware) but the box is
painfully slow. Applications take so long to load it's a chore even working
on it. Will XP even function on 128, I told him I thought the minimum was at
least 256 if not more. He has room for 2 more sticks ( 2 empty slots) and
can max it out at something like 792 according to Crucial.

XP will run with 128 megs of RAM but quite poorly.
256megs is a more realistic minimal number

Go into the control panel, system
and on the advanced tab....set for best performance


that will help a little but the real solution is to add more ram

I'd add a stick of 512megs

 

[the staring frogs of Southern Iberia]

Thanks. The confusing part is he has supposedly two identical computers that
he uses in his used car business that are networked and the other seems a
lot quicker. It's still not fast but definetly faster than the one I'm
working on.

 

[Shenan Stanley]

My brother in law is convinced he's got a virus or somethings wrong
with his computer. After running Belarc Adviser to see what his
computer was made up of it shows he's only got 128 Mg of ram. I
d'loaded AVG, Adaware and Spybot to clean it up ( he did have a
virus and bunches of malware) but the box is painfully slow.
Applications take so long to load it's a chore even working on it.
Will XP even function on 128, I told him I thought the minimum was
at least 256 if not more. He has room for 2 more sticks ( 2 empty
slots) and can max it out at something like 792 according to
Crucial.

First - 128MB iwill run slow on any Windows XP machine.
Second - having seen you respond that he has an identical machine that is
running faster - I have to ask just *how* identical is it? Same video card?
Same processor? Same hard disk drive? Same stuff installed?

It could be that you have *not* cleaned it up. The only way to be sure is
backup important (to them) stuff and clean install it.

Max it if possible in RAM (max them both out if there are plans to keep
these indefinitely.) Know that computers that will probably out-perform
this one with 3 year warranties would cost $300-$600 before doing it,
however.

 

[RichardOnRails]

My brother in law is convinced he's got a virus or somethings wrong with his
computer. After running Belarc Adviser to see what his computer was made up
of it shows he's only got 128 Mg of ram. I d'loaded AVG, Adaware and Spybot
to clean it up ( he did have a virus and bunches of malware) but the box is
painfully slow. Applications take so long to load it's a chore even working
on it. Will XP even function on 128, I told him I thought the minimum was at
least 256 if not more. He has room for 2 more sticks ( 2 empty slots) and
can max it out at something like 792 according to Crucial.

I'd look at Control Panel / System ... General tab: The last line on
my system announce the speed and size of RAM.

HTH,
Richard

 

[philo]

Thanks. The confusing part is he has supposedly two identical computers that
he uses in his used car business that are networked and the other seems a
lot quicker. It's still not fast but definetly faster than the one I'm
working on.

Well, to get the most out of the machine...
in addition to setting for best performance as I've already mentioned...

you may want to run a disk cleanup and defrag the harddrive

also run msconfig and take any unneeded applications out of startup.

You will need to leave the virus checker there...but chances are,
anything else there can be taken out.

But definately consider adding more RAM ithe prices have been pretty good
lately

 

[the staring frogs of Southern Iberia]

Thanks for all suggestions. Machines are Compaq Deskpro En. Didn't run
Belarc on the "good" machine, probably should have to determine if they are
indeed the same. Gotta go find some memory, thanks.

 

[kookieman]

Wrong decision. That computer will not use DDR2 memory. And any other
memory is very expensive because it is no longer commercial. You need to
know when to junk something that is making you less productive.

 

[philo]

Wrong decision. That computer will not use DDR2 memory. And any other
memory is very expensive because it is no longer commercial. You need to
know when to junk something that is making you less productive.

LOL I just bought 2 gigs of DDR-1 for $80 total.
It's never been cheaper.

The only RAM that's too expensive to think about is that RDRAM which
probably costs $500
for a gig

 

[M.I.5¾]

My brother in law is convinced he's got a virus or somethings wrong with
his computer. After running Belarc Adviser to see what his computer was
made up of it shows he's only got 128 Mg of ram. I d'loaded AVG, Adaware
and Spybot to clean it up ( he did have a virus and bunches of malware)
but the box is painfully slow. Applications take so long to load it's a
chore even working on it. Will XP even function on 128, I told him I
thought the minimum was at least 256 if not more. He has room for 2 more
sticks ( 2 empty slots) and can max it out at something like 792 according
to Crucial.

Interstingly there was a bit of a competition going on on anothe forum as to
who could get Windoes XP to run on the smallest configuration.

Last time I looked, one of the protagonists had got XP working on a
underclocked Pentium at 12 MHz in just 20 Mb* of RAM.

Apparently, it takes just over 50 minutes just to boot it up.

*For anyone wanting to try: You have to have at least 64Mb of RAM before XP
will install, but you can subtract RAM after installation.

 

[the staring frogs of Southern Iberia]

I know it's not DDR, but SDram. Crucial lists two sticks of 256 for around
$60. It's a cheap try to speed it up.

 

[philo]

Interstingly there was a bit of a competition going on on anothe forum as to
who could get Windoes XP to run on the smallest configuration.

Last time I looked, one of the protagonists had got XP working on a
underclocked Pentium at 12 MHz in just 20 Mb* of RAM.

Apparently, it takes just over 50 minutes just to boot it up.

*For anyone wanting to try: You have to have at least 64Mb of RAM before XP
will install, but you can subtract RAM after installation.

I saw that link, then gave up on my experiments.

My best "minimal" experiment was to get win98 running on a 386.
Though I managed to do so, it was simply back hacking Win98 back to Win95 by
using Winlite
and a few registry deletions.

But as to XP, I would not consider using it with less than 256megs of ram

 

[M.I.5¾]

I know it's not DDR, but SDram. Crucial lists two sticks of 256 for around
$60. It's a cheap try to speed it up.

I'm not sure that the objective was to produce a fast PC of lowly spec.
Just to produce the minimal spec on which XP would run, however slowly.

 

[R. McCarty]

Under most situations XP uses around 240 Megabytes of RAM
under normal "Idle" mode. Since the PC is older, I'd just install a
single 256-Megabyte module taking the total to 384. If the OP is
doing normal things taking the RAM to a greater total is probably
unnecessary.

 

[Bill Sharpe]

Interstingly there was a bit of a competition going on on anothe forum as to
who could get Windoes XP to run on the smallest configuration.

Last time I looked, one of the protagonists had got XP working on a
underclocked Pentium at 12 MHz in just 20 Mb* of RAM.

Apparently, it takes just over 50 minutes just to boot it up.

*For anyone wanting to try: You have to have at least 64Mb of RAM before XP
will install, but you can subtract RAM after installation.

Aside from bragging rights, what is the point?

Bill

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Applications take so long to load it's a chore even working
on it. Will XP even function on 128,

Yes. The official minimum is 64MB. Note that that's the amount it
takes to get it to run at all. It will certainly not run anything
close to well with that little RAM.

I told him I thought the minimum was at
least 256 if not more.

No. But 256 is the minimum amount I would recommend for anyone.

How much RAM you need for good performance is *not* a
one-size-fits-all situation. You get good performance if the amount of
RAM you have keeps you from using the page file, and that depends on
what apps you run. Most people running a typical range of business
applications find that somewhere around 256-384MB works well, others
need 512MB. Almost anyone will see poor performance with less than
256MB. Some people, particularly those doing things like editing large
photographic images, can see a performance boost by adding even more
than 512MB--sometimes much more.

If you are currently using the page file significantly, more memory
will decrease or eliminate that usage, and improve your performance.
If you are not using the page file significantly, more memory will do
nothing for you. Go to
http://billsway.com/notes_public/winxp_tweaks/ and download
WinXP-2K_Pagefile.zip and monitor your pagefile usage. That should
give you a good idea of how much more memory he can make effective use
of.

He has room for 2 more sticks ( 2 empty slots) and
can max it out at something like 792 according to Crucial.

Probably 768MB, with three 256MB sticks.

He should have at least 256MB and very likely more. Considering the
low price of RAM these days, it might make sense just to put in the
maximum it will take.

 

[the staring frogs of Southern Iberia]

Franky I told him he needs to upgrade both his boxes to today's
standards but being in the used car business and economic times being what
they are he is balking at spending any more than absolutely necessary. He
can get two basic laptops with 1 to 2 gigs of ram for under a thousand but
can't just do it at the present time so my thoughts were to get his machines
moving quicker than the eleven mph they seem to function most of the time.
Thanks for all the help and ideas.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

DDR is not prohibitively expensive.

Wrong decision. That computer will not use DDR2 memory. And any other
memory is very expensive because it is no longer commercial. You need to
know when to junk something that is making you less productive.

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

Franky I told him he needs to upgrade both his boxes to today's

standards but being in the used car business and economic times being what
they are he is balking at spending any more than absolutely necessary. He
can get two basic laptops with 1 to 2 gigs of ram for under a thousand but
can't just do it at the present time so my thoughts were to get his
machines moving quicker than the eleven mph they seem to function most of
the time. Thanks for all the help and ideas.

Consider the aggravation of constantly waiting for a machine to *do*
something while it's paging to disk back and forth. Translate that to loss
of productivity.

I'd spend the money in a heartbeat.