Is lack of RAM making my computer slow?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have windows XP pro, a 20 GB hard drive, 1.2 Ghz athlon and 256 MB DDR RAM.

My ram goes down to 15 MB of free RAM (i have a Memturbo program that shows how much free RAM you have) but even when i have 150 MB free the computer is still slow. My brother said that a lack of virtual memory might be the problem to i went to this site which shows how to increase virtual memory. My virtual memory has a max of 768 MB and is at 768 MB.

Also, if you look at the Windows task manager icon, under commit charge (k), i noticed my total was about 90000 and my limit was 102000, which i take to mean i’m using 90% of my memory and all my virtual memory, but my free RAM still goes down to 14MB and my virtual memory still gets too low alot of times.

So what do i do to remedy this? I am going to try to find a deal on another 256MB of DDR RAM and install that, giving me 512MB DDR. i’ve tried SDRAM but this motherboard won’t accept SDRAM for some reason.

2

XP will work fine in most cases with 128 megs of RAM and a few open IE windows or office types apps opened, so it is highly unlikely 256 is choking your system speed unless you have an insane number of windows and apps open at once.

In my experience when systems above a gig processor speed seem boggy and a full or misbehaving hard drive and the usual hardware suspects have been eliminated, the culprit is often lots of annoyware, spyware and crapware applets loading at startup and chewing up resources.

3

Lack of Ram slows computers down

Rack of Lamb slows people down