I bought a Dell 2400 via the Internet some years back (2004?), and it was extremely slow from the beginning. It was a 2.4 gig whatever (RAM?) with 40 gig hard drive. Nothing awesome, but the numbers were right, for me, but it was, as mentioned, terribly, terribly slow. My gf also bought one at the same time, and same results, except hers was a little quicker. I would pitch it, except I still have hope. Or, had hope. The other night, I went and bought a 40gig drive hp, with XP, from somebody off of craigslist, and I saw my Dell on the floor. He mentioned that he had a lot of those, and said something about them being dogs, but I was in a hurry to get home, so I didn’t talk with him further.
So, is there a known quirk with the 2400’s, or did I just get unlucky?
Thanks,
hansomeharry
It’s probably a combination of a poorly optimized version of windows, Dell boatware, and maybe low system specs on those models.
2.4GHz is the processor speed, which is plenty fast. You probably need more RAM.
A Dell 2400? Hah! Dude, what you need is a Bates 4000. It doesn’t get any better than that.
*** Warning: language may not be Safe For Workplace.
Friend has a Vista machine he bought late in '07-came with at least one incompatible driver which should have been caught when Dell tested it. Slow as heck-he’s hoping that getting extra ram (Vista needs more than just 1 gig), because right now he’s plagued with slowdowns and lag in many games, ostensibly because of all the virtual memory swapping going on. Hope it works for him (as I have some games which he can’t run due to this issue).
Clock speed has not been a useful indicator of CPU performance since the Pentium III days. A Phenom 8750, clocked at 2.4 GHz, would undoubtedly be more than adequate for anything but heavy gaming. However, a Northwood Celeron clocked at 2.4 GHz would probably be rather clunky.
That said, RAM is usually the first place to look when you have a slow system, because it’s cheap and easy, and can often have a significant performance impact. My grandparents have an old Dell laptop, and that thing ran like a beast until I put another 512 MiB in it for them.
I concur. We’ve been using a Dell Dimension 2400 as a business computer for 7 or 8 years now, and it’s done it’s job reliably and without any fuss.
Last month I foolishly decided to ‘upgrade’ from Office 2000 Small Business to Office 2007 Small Business. :smack: Performance suffered tremendiously. I have since swapped the original 512M stick for a new Kingston 1G stick, and performance has improved considerably. I’m considering adding another 1G stick in the other slot, but, after all, it’s an old machine, and who knows when it’ll decide it’s had enough?
BTW, compared to what’s available today, these old boxes may indeed be ‘dogs’, but they were a pretty good value when they first came out. Don’t feel bad.
On the RAM issue… some computers come with two chips (for example a 512 machine has two 256 chips). It’s possible for one of those chips to go dead. You won’t always spot that if you aren’t the techie sort who checks system properties periodically.
Other than that, it could just be a lousy processor with a high clock speed as others have said. They sound a lot faster than they really are.
Heh…I’m posting this from my Dimension 2400 of the same vintage. It’s always been a fine computer for me, though I’m not much of a hardcore gamer.
Damn dial-up nerfs that more than the computer. The upshot is that, since I’m limited to 56k anyway, there’s no need to upgrade the computer to take advantage of the newest games.
Still, mine’s fast when it comes to every day tasks, FWIW.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5kCEngoFrc)“How many megs of RAM do you have on your computer?”
(NSFW, broke link)
Thanks to everybody for the fine input! I would have responded earlier, but I had the work thing.
Now, I shall attempt to upgrade the RAM.
Thanks again,
handsomeharry
Download the free Belarc Advisor and run it before you do any upgrading. It will tell you all kinds of details about your machine & the setup, etc., that will be useful in deciding what you should do to upgrade.
This one was always crappy. I had a 2 gig drive before that, vintage '96, with windows 95 that ran circles around it. I bought another one later, with only 40gig, an A Open brand, and it was about a hundred times faster. I never waste times on games, it just takes longer on the Dell than everything else. I definitely took a lashing, I just don’t know what the cause for it was.