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    Ram Upgrade on Dell Inspiron 2650

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by Liquid Cool, Sep 7, 2006.

  1. Liquid Cool

    Liquid Cool Notebook Guru

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    Hello Folks,

    Recently did a ram upgrade on a friends Inspiron 2650. The Ram was 256mb's we upgraded to 512mb. The notebook booted up fine and runs pretty good, but we've been noticing CPU usage is real high, it can be up to 90% just opening a small program. It wasn't like this before we upgraded the ram.

    I did up the swap file from 384mb to 786mb...is there something else that could be going on here that were not aware of?

    Were using a fresh install of winxp with sp2.

    Any help appreciated,

    Liquid Cool
     
    Liquid Cool, Sep 7, 2006
    #1
  2. outkastland

    outkastland Notebook Evangelist

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    sounds like the computer is being taxed for sure, but then again still seems normal for only 512 mb, thats the minimus for xp
     
    outkastland, Sep 7, 2006
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  3. Bhatman

    Bhatman Notebook Evangelist

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    Actually the minimum requirement to run XP is 128MB of RAM.

    Have you seen what processes are running in the background?(It could be redundant programs or some program takin alot of memory.)
     
    Bhatman, Sep 8, 2006
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  4. Iceman0124

    Iceman0124 More news from nowhere

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    128 megs of ram in window xp is like riding a single speed bicycle up a 2 mile 50 degree incline,it can be done, but it aint gonna be fun or pretty, 1 gig is the sweet spot for xp, 2 gig is better, but not necesarry, bring up the task manager and click the performance tab and see how much of your pagefile is being used, if its more than the physical amount of ram installed, your hard drive is going to be thrashing and performance will crawl
     
    Iceman0124, Sep 8, 2006
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  5. drumfu

    drumfu super modfu

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    interesting problem.

    not sure if it would make a difference, but did you reinstall all of the goodies from dell like chipset support?
     
    drumfu, Sep 8, 2006
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