Speed up a P3?

[jtsnow]

My wife inherited my 2001 Dimension XPS. Its a P3 with 256K and a 7200 RPM
20 GB with XP Home installed (the config is attached below). Had not used
it in some time and ....

It is slower the mollasses!

I thought it was slow HD as it seems to spend of lot of time accessing the
drive. So I bought a 7200 RPM drive but now see it had one of that RPM
already and did not install the new drive. I thought 256M of memory was
adequate.

Is there a way to help speed up the thing?

YOU think the new 120MB 7200 RPM drive I got will be a lot faster then the
20G 7200 RPM drive thats in it now?

Any tips appreciated.

 

[Brooks Moses]

My wife inherited my 2001 Dimension XPS. Its a P3 with 256K and a 7200 RPM
20 GB with XP Home installed (the config is attached below). Had not used
it in some time and ....

It is slower the mollasses!

I thought it was slow HD as it seems to spend of lot of time accessing the
drive. So I bought a 7200 RPM drive but now see it had one of that RPM
already and did not install the new drive. I thought 256M of memory was
adequate.

"Adequate", in this case, means "It will run fine, but it's likely to be
slow". I expect an upgrade would make a notable difference in
performance.

Beyond that, try defragmenting the disk. A fragmented disk can have a
tremendous effect on the perceived speed of a computer.

Depending on when you notice the slowness, it might be a good idea to go
through the settings and turn off all of XP's "visual effects" such as
scrolling-out menus and such -- those make a slightly slow computer seem
very slow.

- Brooks

 

[Mac Cool]

jtsnow:

My wife inherited my 2001 Dimension XPS. Its a P3 with 256K and a
7200 RPM 20 GB with XP Home installed (the config is attached below).
Had not used it in some time and ....

It is slower the mollasses!

I have a 2001 Dimension and it is a 2.53Ghz P4, which was mid to low end
at the time, so I doubt you have a 2001 Dimension with a P3.

I thought 256M of memory was adequate.

My system came with 256MB and I upgraded to 512, there was a drastic
performance increase. I recently upped to 768MB and saw another
performance increase.

The 2001 4500/4550 series used DDR RAM, the 8400 series used RDRAM, I
think the XPS machines also used RDRAM, but check before buying. You can
punch in the service tag on dell.com or use a utility like:
http://www.lavalys.com/products/overview.php?pid=1&lang=en&pageid=1

Is there a way to help speed up the thing?

Defrag the hard drive and increase the memory. Find out what you really
have under the hood and we can see if there are other options.

YOU think the new 120MB 7200 RPM drive I got will be a lot faster
then the 20G 7200 RPM drive thats in it now?

No.

 

[Al Dykes]

My wife inherited my 2001 Dimension XPS. Its a P3 with 256K and a 7200 RPM
20 GB with XP Home installed (the config is attached below). Had not used
it in some time and ....

It is slower the mollasses!

I thought it was slow HD as it seems to spend of lot of time accessing the
drive. So I bought a 7200 RPM drive but now see it had one of that RPM
already and did not install the new drive. I thought 256M of memory was
adequate.

Is there a way to help speed up the thing?

YOU think the new 120MB 7200 RPM drive I got will be a lot faster then the
20G 7200 RPM drive thats in it now?

Any tips appreciated.

P3 - what CPU speed ?

It should be OK if you go into controlpanel/system and set it to optomize performance.

You should also run run spyware detection/removal software.

 

[jtsnow]

yea..defrag didnt help much. I guess its the memory.
Where do you can you find the most inexpensive memory?

thax again!

 

[jtsnow]

is 600mhz. I check out the optimize you mention.

thanks again!

 

[Brooks Moses]

yea..defrag didnt help much. I guess its the memory.
Where do you can you find the most inexpensive memory?

That depends on what sort of memory you're looking for. With a 600MHz
P3, your computer probably takes PC133 memory. In my experience, that
stuff is pretty much dirt cheap if you buy it used from college students
who are upgrading their computers, but that requires having access to a
campus for-sale newsgroup and waiting a while. If you don't mind used
and want it immediately, though, eBay works pretty well if you find a
reputable seller.

Alternately, for new memory, I usually buy from www.crucial.com --
they're a branch of one of the major memory manufacturers (I forget
which one, though), and have good quality stuff at reasonable prices for
the quality. If you want cheap new memory, go to one of the various
price-finder sites; I tend to use the one off www.tomshardware.com,
because I can remember the url. Or go to www.18004memory.com; I bought
from them once (off an eBay auction, actually) and had a good
experience, and they seem to have pretty cheap prices.

- Brooks

 

[MCheu]

My wife inherited my 2001 Dimension XPS. Its a P3 with 256K and a 7200 RPM
20 GB with XP Home installed (the config is attached below). Had not used
it in some time and ....

It is slower the mollasses!

I thought it was slow HD as it seems to spend of lot of time accessing the
drive. So I bought a 7200 RPM drive but now see it had one of that RPM
already and did not install the new drive. I thought 256M of memory was
adequate.

Is there a way to help speed up the thing?

YOU think the new 120MB 7200 RPM drive I got will be a lot faster then the
20G 7200 RPM drive thats in it now?

Any tips appreciated.

256Megs of RAM isn't adequate for XP and that's likely the source of
your speed problems. For most modern applications on XP, 256Megs is
the absolute minimum that one would want on the machine. I would
suggest you bump that up to 512Megs, or 1Gig if you can afford it and
have the space for it.

Going to a bigger hard drive likely won't do much for speed unless
you're really running low on space (by that, I mean you're down to
2Gig or less). Yes, the data is stored more tightly on the platters
on a 120Gig than a 20Gig, so at the same RPM, transfer rate will be
faster. Will it be noticeably faster? Probably not. Don't get a
bigger hard drive for speed, get it for the storage space.

 

[IsaacKuo]

My wife inherited my 2001 Dimension XPS. Its a P3 with
256K and a 7200 RPM 20 GB with XP Home

256K???!!!????!??? Hopefully, you mean 256 megs.

It is slower the mollasses!

What sort of applications are you running? My XP computer
is an old 400mhz laptop with 128megs of RAM. I never run
much more than Firefox on it, and it's quite responsive at
that. I'm sure it would bog down with an Office application,
though. My XP install is somewhat lean, but still has
niceties like anti-aliased fonts and menu shadows and such.

My main workstation is closer to your setup--a 550mhz P3
with 256megs of RAM. However, I only run Linux and Windows
98 on it. Both Linux and Win98 are very responsive, although
naturally not as zippy as my faster computer.

I thought 256M of memory was adequate.

Depending on what you are doing on the machine, it should be.
My lean XP laptop has half that memory and is responsive
enough for me. Still, a couple of my computers have 256megs
of RAM and I definitely feel the limitations of it when I
run multiple heavy applications at once.

Is there a way to help speed up the thing?

YOU think the new 120MB 7200 RPM drive I got will be a
lot faster then the 20G 7200 RPM drive thats in it now?

The 120gig drive should be faster than the 20gig drive.

The platters spin at the same rate, but the data in a
120gig drive is more densely packed than the data in a
20gig drive. It should have roughly 2.5 times the transfer
rate. However, seek times will be roughly the same
because it takes the same amount of time to wait for the
desired data to spin around to the read/write head.

Isaac Kuo

 

[Beck]

256Megs of RAM isn't adequate for XP and that's likely the source of
your speed problems. For most modern applications on XP, 256Megs is
the absolute minimum that one would want on the machine. I would
suggest you bump that up to 512Megs, or 1Gig if you can afford it and
have the space for it.

Yes it is. I run XP on my laptop 128mb here. It runs fine. In fact it
only has 120mb ram as 8mb is shared for the video card. I have no problems
with it whatsoever.

 

[Yves Lacombe]

(e-mail address removed) says...

My wife inherited my 2001 Dimension XPS. Its a P3 with 256K and a 7200 RPM
20 GB with XP Home installed (the config is attached below). Had not used
it in some time and ....

It is slower the mollasses!

I thought it was slow HD as it seems to spend of lot of time accessing the
drive. So I bought a 7200 RPM drive but now see it had one of that RPM
already and did not install the new drive. I thought 256M of memory was
adequate.

Is there a way to help speed up the thing?

YOU think the new 120MB 7200 RPM drive I got will be a lot faster then the
20G 7200 RPM drive thats in it now?

Windows XP Home really thrives better on 512MB of RAM at least, however
before you spend any money - assuming the machine was inherited with OS
and APPs still installed, you might want to run spybot S&D and adaware
on it to find if it's crawling with spyware. If there's one thing that
I've learned after reassembling the machines of several family members
is that they always say "YES" to the question "do you want to install
this PC Accelerator tool" POPUP they get [spyware crap].

I wouldn't be surprised if the slowness that you see came from such
beasties.

- Yves

 

[Mac Cool]

jtsnow:

yea..defrag didnt help much. I guess its the memory.
Where do you can you find the most inexpensive memory?

The cheapest, quality memory that I've found was Crucial.com. Don't
subject yourself to the aggravation of generic memory. I recommend
Corsair, Mushkin, and Crucial; I haven't heard any complaints about
Kingston or OCZ.

[update] I read further down that you have a 600Mhz P3 XPS, that should be
PC100, PC133 should work also. Your machine is from around '98, not 2001.

 

[ftran999]

My wife inherited my 2001 Dimension XPS. Its a P3 with 256K and a 7200
RPM 20 GB with XP Home installed (the config is attached below). Had not
used it in some time and ....

It is slower the mollasses!

I thought it was slow HD as it seems to spend of lot of time accessing the
drive. So I bought a 7200 RPM drive but now see it had one of that RPM
already and did not install the new drive. I thought 256M of memory was
adequate.

Is there a way to help speed up the thing?

YOU think the new 120MB 7200 RPM drive I got will be a lot faster then the
20G 7200 RPM drive thats in it now?

Any tips appreciated.

Before your wife inherited your PC did you format the HD, i.e. completely
wipe out all data on it. If you didn't I suspect the sluggishness might be
do to too much clutter on the drive. Especially on one that's around 5 yrs
old. Make sure you backup your important files and programs and format your
HD.
With your PC you should be able to upgrade your 600MHz to around 1 or
1.1Ghz. I had the 500MHz version and was able to upgrade to 1GHz.
This site will be very helpful: http://www.roberthancock.com/dell/
With P3s being dirt cheap this is something I would seriously consider.

 

[BarryNL]

jtsnow:




I have a 2001 Dimension and it is a 2.53Ghz P4, which was mid to low end
at the time, so I doubt you have a 2001 Dimension with a P3.

That's a good trick when the fastest P4 shipped in 2001 was the 2.0Ghz.
Intel didn't launch the 2.53Ghz until May 2002.

 

[Matt]

That's a good trick when the fastest P4 shipped in 2001 was the 2.0Ghz.
Intel didn't launch the 2.53Ghz until May 2002.

2.53 was mid to low end in the first quarter of '03.

 

[Mac Cool]

BarryNL:

That's a good trick when the fastest P4 shipped in 2001 was the
2.0Ghz. Intel didn't launch the 2.53Ghz until May 2002.

My bad. I bought the Dimension in October of 2002, not 2001; and it was
among the cheapest machines Dell had at the time.

Nevertheless, his 600Mhz XPS is not a 2001 either; which was the point.