Or know where I can get some for like a dollar? (Don’t say eBay, I’ve been down that road, and the results aren’t pretty.)
I’ve got a lot of work to be doing with my PCs and one would think that something as simple as running a word processor and a web browser at the same time wouldn’t be too great of a strain on my system, but I’m pegging my systems hard. So much so that I’m losing an inordinate amount of time simply waiting for the machines to catch up with themselves and splitting the tasks up between two machines (I’ve got them hooked up to the same monitor via KVM) only slightly alleviates the problem. Add to that my internet connection cutting in and out with a great deal of regularity and I’m pulling my hair out.
Yes, I’ve done virus/spyware scans and the machines are clean, so that’s not the issue, it’s just that not having 512MB worth of RAM in either box is a hinderence. Even pulling up Task Manager and killing everything I can is a minimal improvement.
The one box is using ancient PC100 RAM, the other is using DDR-400 (PC-3200). The configurations of the RAM in the PCs is such that I’ll need a stick of 512MB RAM or larger to slap in the puppies to be able to get them in a range where they’ll work. (One box has 3 slots with 128MB in two and 64MB in the third. The other has two slots with 128MB in both.)
I have a stick of Kingston 512 PC-3200 RAM. However, I’m not sure that it isn’t dead, as I could never get it to work in my computer. (Then again, my motherboard has some funny things going on with how it handles memory and specific requirements.) It’s yours if you want it.
For my birthday my brother bought me a gig if RAM, and I have the 128MB stick I took out but I don’t think you’d want that since it’s so small. But if you do, you can have it.
Did you look at task manager to see what percentage of CPU each task is taking? You can try giving the web browser a priority of below normal, so the word processor can run normally. Check the system’s options for memory, and see that the virtual memory isn’t set up badly. Ignore this if you have given up.
I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t really make any difference. The machine comes to a screeching halt when the word processor (OpenOffice) does an autosave (which you, of course, have to have when you’ve no idea of how long the power’s going to last, as it like’s to ripple here), add in the web brower checking for email, the anti-virus program checking for updates (all of which seem to occur at the same time for some reason) and I get to spend a lot of time staring at the hard drive activity light. Even killing the apps takes for freakin’ ever, and in the case of some of them, it seems that I need a wooden stake to make sure they’re well and truly dead.
What speed is your IDE drive interfaced at? When you only have a 33 instead of a 66 , 100 or 133 Ultra ATA interface the disk interface can be the bottle neck. In the device manager see what the IDE properties bring up for speed and mode under advance settings. A fast interface will read Ultra Mode 5. From the clues about your computer I take it you are using IDE drives. You can email me if you want to look further into the hard drive set up, and don’t want it all in this thread.
Well, I’m not pulling up anything useful on the IDE speeds (just gettng “Autodetect”). Then again, I’m running XP Home and on my other box the XP-Pro partition needs to be repaired, and I don’t know how to check it in Ubuntu.