I’m running a Pentium 4 machine from 2002 running Windows XP. Would like to keep it going for a couple more years due to budget issues. The machine has 512K of RAM. In the last year it’s begun to run noticeably slower even though I have not installed any new software and use Avast anti-virus.
I think I need more RAM. What do you think and recommend?
Max it out. A machine like yours, running 32-bit Windows XP, will probably not support more than 2 GiB, and 32-bit machines can’t support more than 4 GiB. (If you’re running 64-bit Windows, let us know!)
Two GiB of memory is cheap now.
Also remember you really need to buy ram in pairs. In otherwords you need to check how many slots you have and pair them correctly. If you want 3g of ram and you have 3 slots you should use three 1g pieces of ram. This works much better than say, 1g of ram in one slot and 2g of ram in the other slot.
That wouldn’t harm your computer, but using three 1g pieces of ram in that example would make the computer run at its best
Two gigs should be fine.
My main work computer is a Pentium 4 of the same era as yours, 2.6GHz overclocked at 3.2GHz with 2GB RAM and a decent AGP graphics card. It runs Windows Vista with no problems at all. Actually, for office applications it is no slower than my home computer which has a dual-core E6600 processor.
BUT, I have another computer at work, pretty much same specs as my main one but it has a Pentium 4 Celeron instead. It had originally 1GB RAM and I upgraded it to 2 with the hope that it would perform a little faster than a dead snail but to no avail.
So in short: If you have a real Pentium 4, go for the RAM upgrade. If it is a Celeron, don’t bother.
How do I tell the difference?
How do I tell the difference? My computer shows Intel Pentium 4 1.8 GHz.
RAM is used by running programs, and if your programs haven’t changed, their RAM requirements haven’t, either. Getting more RAM may make your system faster, but it’s unlikely to be the reason for your slowdown.
Windows machines slowing down is most often related to one of three things:
(1) Malware. Viruses, trojans, worms, that sort of thing. You’re running decent anti-virus, so this isn’t likely, but you might want to do a scan with something else, just in case.
(2) Insufficient Hard drive space. Assuming you’ve been doing your system updates and creating documents, they’ve been whittling down the space on your main (system, probably C: ) drive. Check to make sure that the “space free” is at least 10%, and preferably 20%, of the drive size. If not, a new hard drive will be a better investment than the same $$ amount of RAM.
(3) Fragmented or damaged file system: If the drive is FAT32 (or you don’t know), run a full disk check on it from the “Tools” tab on the drive properties. Then run a defragment on it from the same place. These two operations will take a long time (hours) and may require reboots, depending on the quirks of your system.
Also, read your system manual (you can download it if you don’t already have it) before adding RAM. Markxxx’s advice is true for some systems, but not others – some want individual sticks, some pairs, some triples. Do what your manual says.
Damn that’s an old computer. How much do you want to spend? Because I can tell you that for $150 you can swap out the motherboard and CPU for whatever is the cheapest crap on the market, and it’ll perform several times faster. Pentium 4 1.8 is horrible.
Like Emeril says, BAM
Look up “STOP 7B” for info on how to move your XP install without reformatting.
Go to Crucial and see what they recommend. Since you’re on a budget I expect you’re going to stick with Windows XP and not upgrade to Windows 7 so the 64 bit issue does not arise.
Second the vote for Crucial (but you might not want the UK site, unless you are in the UK). Use their Memory Advisor tool. It will go inside your machine, see exactly what you have, and exactly what you have room for. Go for the max; it won’t be very expensive. Good luck!..TRM
Some computers won’t let you have odd number of ram sticks, anyway, though, so he might be forced to buy ram in pairs rather than buying just one stick. With both of the last two computer I’ve added ram to my manuals have said that they must be installed in pairs, and the memory already in the computer was a matched pair as well. I’ve had HPs for my last three computers, so it could be just a quirk of the brand, but the OP should look into what’s kosher with his machine first.
About $100 worth. Maybe bit more if you want to be future proof for more than 4 years or so, but you can just as well wait for 4 years and buy another $100 worth of RAM.
For current prices, that would buy you about 4 Gb.
$50 worth will get you enough to run pretty much anything usual, but it will get cramped if you’re doing interesting stuff.
This advice will probably be valid for the next 5 years at least, only you’ll get more RAM for the money. Also, if your computer isn’t worth investing another $100 in, get a new one. You can probably buy a new machine with at least $50 worth of RAM for less than $300.
Just drive around on garbage day and round up what computers you can find. Once you’ve a few, pay some kid $20 to strip them and upgrade what he can in your machine.
Something else you can do to speed it up is a “nuke and pave” re-install of Windows. Round up the install CDs for your applications and copy all of your files to CDs or USB drives, then re-format the drive and install Windows from scratch.
If you’ve had that PC running since the time that a 1.8 GHz Pentium was sold, there’s a lot of junk built up that’s slowing it down.
Thanks for all the input. I’ll work my way through the suggestions and see what works.
I have a machine from 2003 with a similar spec, and I added 1GB of RAM which improved things considerably. Could add another 1GB, and might do so.
It’d be funny if your '02 P4 is running RDRAM.
First off, are you sure its RAM? I support a lot of machines with “just” 512 and they really dont hit the paging file that often. PC nerds scoff at 512, but its really a sweet spot for XP users who dont have special needs. Slowness in old PCs has a lot of causes and unless youre usage has changed drastically it may not be RAM.
For the most part a disk defrag is in order. Secondly, are there a lot of items in your system tray? If you have a lot of items fighting for disk queues, processor time, etc then the RAM wont help. Uninstall everything you dont need. If youre feeling adventurous just backup your documents and reinstall windows from scratch.
Once thats done decide if you really need the RAM. If so you can probably get 2gigs worth for a price. XP can only address ~3 gigs of usable RAM, so buying 4gigs is never worth it for old machines. If you machine can handle a pair of 1gig each then thats the way to go.
Now the price of older RAM actually goes up, which is uncommon in the world of computers as everything usually gets cheaper with age, but no one is making DDR1 RAM anymore so the demand makes it expensive. When I price this stuff out its pretty ridiculous. I would be extremely hesitant to spend $100-150 dollars on a beater like yours. For 400-500 you can get a dual core machine from Dell with Windows 7 and possibly a widescreen monitor.
$100 to $150 does not agree with my cursory research. I found 2 GiB of DDR400, at the superior CAS latency of 2, for $75. If you don’t care about the latency and so are willing to get RAM with latency of 3, it’s even cheaper.
This, of course, assumes that this old P4 system uses DDR SDRAM. As Alex_Dubinsky pointed out, DRDRAM was somewhat en vogue in Intel systems of the day, and who knows what obscure place would sell that.
To the OP: Define “slower”.
XP will take up maybe 100 to 150 megs or so just to run XP. That should leave you with quite a bit of memory left over for programs and all of their data. If your programs are gobbling up the rest of that 512 megs, the big question is why are they doing this now when they weren’t before? If you’ve got some new program that has a memory leak (it just keeps using up more and more memory the longer you use it) then adding more RAM makes it take a bit longer for the computer to slow down, but the computer still slows down. If you’ve got a bunch of crap loading into your system, wiping the disk and re-installing it will make the computer run just as fast as it did when it was new. A clean install of a 1.8 Ghz P4 isn’t blazingly fast by modern standards, but it will do internet, music, videos and that sort of thing fine. Some folks wouldn’t even notice the difference between that and a modern machine. It depends on what you do with it and how many programs you run at once.
So the point is that if it’s a memory issue, a clean install of windows is much more likely to actually fix the problem and won’t cost you any money in parts (unless you invest in an external drive to make the backup and re-install easier).
Another possible issue:
If by “slower” you mean that it takes longer to get your e-mails, or for the straightdope pages to load, etc. the problem may not be your computer. You could have network problems. I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting a lot of slowing and stuttering of youtube videos and the like on my computer, but I know that my computer isn’t the problem. In my case, the network is getting choked somewhere (I have yet to do any troubleshooting to see if the geeklings are overloading the network inside my house or of comcast is just going to crap again).
Putting $100 of RAM into a computer that’s only worth about $50 to $75 doesn’t make much sense to me, especially when there’s a good chance it won’t fix the problem.
A little more info about what exactly you’ve noticed getting slower might help us to narrow the problem down.