John said:
With XP Home Edition, Outlook Express, and IE 7 I have 256 MB Memory,
3.8 GB free space on a 18 GB drive with a 550 MH Pentium III
processor. Also, the fastest cable service from Cox Cable. What is
the weak link here for speed?
Most people will probably say the amount of RAM you have, and that could be
right, but I don't think it's so clear cut.
True, the amount of RAM you have is the lowest that you can expect
acceptable performance from under Windows XP, but whether you need more than
that depends on what apps you run. 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 whether more memory can help, and if so, how much more.
Your 550MHz processor is close to the bottom range for Windows XP, and
replacing that with a faster one will almost certainly speed things up
substantially.
The amount of free disk space isn't really an issue, but an 18GB drive is
tiny these days, and that means it's old. A newer drive will be considerably
faster.
Which of these three weak links is the weakest? I can't say, since so much
depends on how you use your computer and what apps you run.
Is the situation that you want to upgrade something and can't afford to do
it all at once? If so, be aware that you probably really need to upgrade
everything. Your computer is very old and all its components are very slow
by today's standards. There's probably nothing it that's really worth
keeping and rather than upgrade one component at a time, it would probably
be considerably cheaper to bite the bullet and buy a whole new computer.
Have you looked at the inexpensive computers from Dell recently? It's
amazing how much computer you can get for $400 or so, especially if you keep
your old monitor.
