maximizing speed and memory

[Guest]

Hi all,
I was wondering if there was anyway for me to maximize the speed and memory
on my comp. I have an AMD Athlon 900 mhz processor and 384 mb of PC 133 RAM.
I am not interested in buying any new processors or sticks of RAM just yet,
and I would like to make my processors work faster. I have turned off many of
the fancy features of Windows XP Pro, which helped a great deal, but even
still, I know people with only 1.2 or 1.4 ghz (something really close, no
more than 1.4 GHz) processors which is not much more than mine but they have
ALL the features of XP Pro turned on and theres is working extremely fine.
They even have the same RAM as me. They have 4 or 5 games loaded on their
comp. that use A LOT OF the speed, (Age of Mythology- The Titans and the
original, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, Zoo Tycoon). I have used their computers and
found that they are EXTREMELY fast, but then I come home to mine and find
that when I go to load or exit a game, my computer gets extremely slow and I
cant click anything for 1 or 2 minutes, and I even have some of the same
games (Age of Mythology, Diablo 2) Basically, what I'm asking if you haven't
already figured it out completely, is how do I get my computer working just
as fast, or almost as fast as my firends computer without putting a new
processor in? And remeber that it shouldn't be much slower than his because
its only 300 mhz difference in processor.

 

[Guest]

I was wondering if there was anyway for me to maximize the speed and memory
on my comp. I have an AMD Athlon 900 mhz processor and 384 mb of PC 133
RAM.

The only surefire way is to get a faster CPU and/or more RAM. Also make
sure that you take care of your hard drive, which is the other major
bottleneck to overall system speed. By taking care of your hard drive, I
mean regular error checking (I personally do it every Saturday morning), disk
cleanup (I schedule it to run automatically overnight on a daily basis), and
regular defragging (at least weekly, and more often than weekly if you
install or delete lots of files on a regularly basisy).

Outside of these general redommendations, there are a few other things you
can do to squeeze a bit more speed out of your system without going through
the time and expense of adding RAM. For example, you can avoid multi-tasking
as much as possible (i.e. running more than one program at once), which will
give your CPU a slight performance boost. You can turn off all or most of
the eye candy features of XP (which, frankly, get old after a while anyway).
You can uninstall any programs or Windows components you no longer use. You
can reconfigure other programs you don't need to be running all the time to
stop loading when Windows starts (but don't do this with your antivirus
program!). You can turn off unnecessary services running in the background.
If you want to try major surgery, you can even try a clean reinstall of
Windows XP. XP never runs faster or better than just after a clean install
(which should tell you something about the actual effectiveness -- or lack
thereof -- of most third party software and "tweaks" that promise to make XP
run faster).

For what it's worth, I tried all of these steps on my previous computer,
which was also 383MB Ram but on a 800 mhz CPU, and it always zipped along as
fast as it was capable of going. But I now have a computer with over 1 GB of
memory and a processer speed of 3.8 mhz, and there is no comparison in the
relative speed and performance of this computer to my previous one. Computer
speed and performance is about 95-98 hardware and only 2-5 percent anything
you can do something about, and of that 2-5 percent virtually all of it is
related to taking care of your hard drive.

Ken

 

[Plato]

I was wondering if there was anyway for me to maximize the speed and memory
on my comp. I have an AMD Athlon 900 mhz processor and 384 mb of PC 133 RAM.

Minimize the number of programs you have set to run 24/7. Remove all
spyware and trojans from your pc. Make sure you have at least 10 gig
free on C: at all times.

 

[Ron Martell]

Hi all,
I was wondering if there was anyway for me to maximize the speed and memory
on my comp. I have an AMD Athlon 900 mhz processor and 384 mb of PC 133 RAM.
I am not interested in buying any new processors or sticks of RAM just yet,
and I would like to make my processors work faster. I have turned off many of
the fancy features of Windows XP Pro, which helped a great deal, but even
still, I know people with only 1.2 or 1.4 ghz (something really close, no
more than 1.4 GHz) processors which is not much more than mine but they have
ALL the features of XP Pro turned on and theres is working extremely fine.
They even have the same RAM as me. They have 4 or 5 games loaded on their
comp. that use A LOT OF the speed, (Age of Mythology- The Titans and the
original, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, Zoo Tycoon). I have used their computers and
found that they are EXTREMELY fast, but then I come home to mine and find
that when I go to load or exit a game, my computer gets extremely slow and I
cant click anything for 1 or 2 minutes, and I even have some of the same
games (Age of Mythology, Diablo 2) Basically, what I'm asking if you haven't
already figured it out completely, is how do I get my computer working just
as fast, or almost as fast as my firends computer without putting a new
processor in? And remeber that it shouldn't be much slower than his because
its only 300 mhz difference in processor.

You can try configuring the Windows XP services. See
http://www.blackviper.com for suggestions.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

In memory of a dear friend Alex Nichol MVP
http://aumha.org/alex.htm

 

[Sleepless in Seattle]

My guess is you have on(mother)board graphics chipset. Totally useless when
it comes to games. Buy a graphics card.

 

[Gerry Cornell]

Try Ctrl+Alt+Delete to bring Task Manager and select the Process Tab.
What is the Commit Charge?

--


Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FCA

Using invalid email address

Stourport, Worcs, England
Enquire, plan and execute.
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Please tell the newsgroup how any
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[Richard Urban]

As AMD has often stated (and proved) the speed of the processor is NOT
everything. It has a hell of a lot to do with the design of the processor.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Miss Perspicacia Tick]

My guess is you have on(mother)board graphics chipset. Totally
useless when it comes to games. Buy a graphics card.

Which won't improve the situation one iota. A system is only as fast as its
slowest component and may only have a 1-2x speed AGP slot. Sticking a fast
graphics card in it is going to cause a huge bottleneck and his games won't
speed up - if anything they'll probably run slower.

I've just upgraded my graphics card because the old one was causing a severe
bottleneck in my system - now I've upgraded the difference is enormous!