My laptop’s getting old. But, this year, I’ve bought a new battery and put in 1G of RAM. I just need to get some more mileage out of it until I have enough money to buy a new one.
Recently, it started going really slow and restarting suddenly. I figured out, through a memtest, that it was a problem with the RAM. I’ve bought new RAM and put it in.
Still going very slow.
So my first question is whether DDR333 RAM can go in a computer that says it needs DDR226.
I’ve reinstalled windows. Still going slow. I’ve reinstalled all drivers
By this do you mean you simply reinstalled Windows over the old one or did you reformat your drive and reinstall? I would suggest you reformat and start fresh (after backing up all your personal files, of course). The Windows Registry is wonderful, as far as it goes, but it can get bloated and continue to load stuff you no longer need resulting in massive slowness and poor system performance. Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass to reinstall all your software again, but it’s often well worth it.
Once you have everything reinstalled and set up the way you like it, you can make a drive image on a secondary drive, which you can revert to if things get screwed up like this again.
DDR333 should work in the MB - it will run at the lower speed, as long as the BIOS on the motherboard configures it properly.
As for running slowly, I’ve fixed two different older laptops by simply blowing air through the exhaust vents to get all of the accumulated dust out. Depending on the laptop, you may be able to easily access the CPU heatsink and fan, and use compressed air to clean these out. Heat is not a CPU’s friend, and most laptops will throttle themselves down to help reduce heat.
Do you watch porn online? Seriously. I mean, I dont know if it’s possible for virii to survive a re-install of Windows, but I know from umm… friends… that porn can wreck a PC over time.
Do you have XP? The first thing you do is go to the systems properties page and then advanced, and then settings for proformence, make sure the best preformence tab is checked. Then google black viper, and follow his site to remove all the services you dont need. What firewall and antivirus you use? Dont pay for anything and pick up zonealram. and avg.
The memory could be a problem. You can ussually run a faster rated DIMM than you need, but it still could be a problem. What mother board do yo have and what size of memmory did you buy?
That said:
Check the BIOs and look at all the memory setting in it for DIMM. Change it to the speed you bought or the the highest speed it says, instead of automatic.
Look at the L2 cache setting and make sure it is turned on. A L2 cache turned off will make a computer extremely slow.
Q.E.D., I reformatted/reinstalled. That’s why I’m so surprised that it’s going so slow.
Iggins, this might be part of the problem. I ran a BIOS diagnostic, and it turns out my fans (if I understand correctly) aren’t getting up to a high enough speed (error code: 3700:011B). This may be the reason the RAM went bad. The computer was getting too hot, and it ruined the stick.
Nope. But I do watch a ton of youtube/dailymotion/google videos, if that causes the same problem.
I’ve already run spybot and adaware.
I’ll try that.
Mother board? I don’t know. I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 with 1GB of RAM that runs windows XP.
Having reinstalled the OS you may have neglected to install dreivers for the chipsets. Install all the latest drivers from Dell. Contact Dell for help. Your computer may need repair. Do some trouble shoooting with the rep.
Earlier, only one of the fans was working. I looked up how to open this bad boy up, and blew a hole bunch of dust bunnies out of this 5-year-old computer, and now both fans are humming away, and the words I’m typing are appearing as I type them (not in chunks of words every three or four seconds)!
Aha! Sounds like you were slowly roasting the CPU. Intel processors have a “Yikes, it’s too hot!” mode where they chop the clock speed to survive. The system will still run, just very slowly so it doesn’t overheat.
AMD chips, (at least from a handful of years ago) will simply ignore their temperature and soldier on at full speed until something burns out in a couple of seconds.
For those who don’t believe, here’s a video with some irrelevant background music.
Sounds like it was the CPU overheating and cutting down it duty cycles to try and prevent catastrophic failure. You need to watch the CPU fan and replace it if it is running slow.
I already read that. I didn’t miss it. I just put it in front of watch the fan and maybe replace it. I wanted to be clear on the fan the reason for watching the CPU fan. .
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