I am running Windows XP on a Pentium 4 (80 GHZ) and I have 1.87 MB of RAM. I also have only 1.7 GB of free space on my 30GB primary hard drive, so I am going to buy another Hard Drive today with far more space. But - I am thinking, maybe I should also get more RAM too.
My computer’s performance is often abysmal. In the Task Manager, performance is frequently shown at 100% for no discernible reason. Multiple svchost.exe files stay open at one time. Firefox windows will take forever to open, close, or scroll. Image files will take forever to load, especially the giant (5-10 MB) images scanned from film that I frequently work with. Itunes takes centuries to open up. I’m sick of it.
I’m guessing the CPU clock speed is 1.8 GHz not 8 GHz unless you’re over clocking with liquid nitrogen… actually even then, no way.
The possible bottle necks on your PC are:
Your Hard drive - Is it IDE, is it old? Modern drives use SATA II or SATA III ports and feature architecture that lowers latency and improves bandwidth. An old hard drive might just be slow enough to make loading things unbearable.
Your RAM - The more background programs/services you run, the more modern applications you use, the more RAM you will need. If there is not enough RAM available, expect your hard drive to run double duty and your system to slow to a crawl.
Your CPU - Is old. Possibly really old depending on the batch. Modern applications require more CPU time. if your CPU is not up to the task, expect performance to drop significantly.
I’d recommend updating your entire rig. If you’re going to spend $100+ on a new drive and RAM (which I’m guessing is not DDR3, so it will be more expensive than modern RAM modules), might as well spend another $250 and get yourself a modern system.
If that is truly not an option, then yes, I’d get some RAM to go with the new drive.
If it is an option and it seems you feel confident fiddling around with the innards, I’d be happy to recommend some inexpensive parts for you.
Make sure you get a hard drive with the right connection. Hopefully you’re using SATA and not IDE.
I think you’ve got something else going on. More RAM will only help if you are hitting your page file a lot, and it’s not clear that this is what is happening. You can look at your page file usage under the performance tab in the task manager.
Multiple service hosts are normal, but on most systems they take very little CPU time. If you’ve got one or maybe a few that are being CPU hogs that might indicate a problem. You can download Process Explorer from Microsoft’s web site. That will tell you which service each of those service hosts is processing. If there are services running that you don’t need you can disable them in the control panel.
Backing up everything and reinstalling windows would probably give you a much bigger performance boost than anything else at this point. Excessive CPU usage usually means bloatware or malware.
Multiple instances of svchost.exe is normal. Is your hard drive constantly thrashing when things are slow? If so, yeah, you could be out of RAM and paging like mad. You might want to find out what the maximum amount of RAM your system can accept before you buy any, though.
Issues with the registry and malware might also be responsible for system slowdown, and a clean install might help.
But the bottom line is, that hardware is NOT up- to the task of modern computing, unless you’re still using the same exact programs and doing the same exact things you were doing over half a decade ago.
If your hard drive is really that full putting in a new drive will make a huge difference. Then clean up the junk. Benefit of more RAM will likely be small.
Hard drive size will have negligible to no impact on performance. RAM could potentially have a large impact, assuming that it’s the paging file being hit that’s the problem.
First immediate step: Uninstall Spybot to get rid of TeaTimer.exe. That alone might make a big difference.
If you really only have 1.7GB free on your hard drive that is your next major problem. You already have more RAM than most people who run XP.
My suggestion would be to install Windows on the new drive and just trash the old one after you transfer your stuff. That way you won’t have to deal with getting rid of all the junk that is on your system.
I don’t see anything taking up CPU time. Make sure you take the screenshot when your PC is setup in a typical use fashion. That is, have the apps you typically have open and do the things you typically do.
Do you experience a delay when clicking or ALT+Tab’ing from one app to another?
EDIT: Math fail. The progams you are running aren’t taking up a lot of RAM.
I have Windows Vista. When I had less than a gig left of hard drive space in the main partition, Windows began to have slowness issues, and I had warning pop ups from the OS.
I suggest getting a bigger hard drive, and make sure the Windows system partition is bigger than 30 gig.
Yeah, these numbers are probably wrong. Typical processors of today can go up to 2.5 GHz. A RAM size of 1.87 MB might have been seen in 1990. I used a PC with 8 MB in 1995.
The hardware is more than adequate for everyday computing. You really don’t need a lot unless you are doing something like top-of-the-line gaming, video editing, etc.
You probably have just a lot of crap running that you don’t need. Run the usual programs, hijackthis, etc. Find out what’s running on your machine. Look up each one. Figure out if you really need it to be running. Remove it or whatever.
Also do the other usual performance tweaks like disk defrag (yes, NTFS benefits from defragging!).
A clean, low end machine will perform better than a crapware bloated top tier machine any day of the week. And your machine is hardly low end.
Ooh, can I borrow this thread for a minute? When I upgraded to Win7 I started getting infrequent crashes that say Page_Fault_in_Nonpaged_Area. Is this an issue that more RAM will fix?
no, that’s typically a driver bug or (in rarer cases) bad hardware. sometimes a BSOD will give you a filename (for example, if an ATi video driver goes pear-shaped the BSOD might call out atikmdag.sys as the location of the fault.) Those aren’t always accurate, though, where shared code is involved.