would ram help us?

hello, my wife has the HP dv6000 (dv6610ca) with an AMD Turion 64x2, T-50 processor WinXP Home SP2. 1GB Ram, Hard drive is a fujitsu, 5200rpm, 80GB ( here)


It's operating REALLY slowly (might be cause I just bought the Asus M50V-a1) but I updated the lated BIOS firmware, got rid of a LOAD of bloatware and crap she never uses, turned anything un-essential off the startup menu, and I'd like to know if you guys reccommend that I get more RAM for her computer.

How high can I go, and given the specs listed above, do you think she'll notice a difference?

What kind of RAM do you suggest (if u do)?

Cheers, Ryan.

 

Do you know what the RAM usage generally is?

 

Not sure how to tell.

It's mostly booting up, and opening/closing programs she notices. She pretty much just surfs the net, she's not a heavy user.

 

i've deleted over 2 gigs of crapware. if i defrag do you think it would help the speed?

 

yep, it could help, fragmentation of the hdd can slow down the os performance, as well as the amount of percentage of used space on a hdd.

have you opened the taskmanager to see how much tasks are running, and how much ram is used ? you should also take a look how much physical ram is left when your wife´s typical tasks are running.

 

Defragging/reformatting would most likely give you improved performance. Extra RAM (2GB) would probably help as well, depending on what you use the machine for.
In addition to removing bloatware etc. You might want to disable a couple of services (Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services) and startup programs (Start>Run>msconfig). And you should also clean the registry with CCLeaner or something.

 

Use task manager to see what is operating at 100% when the slowdown occurs. Whether its cpu, ram or hdd then you'll know

Also i cant remember if you can view hdd usage in xp in task manager so you may need to download a monitoring program to do this (nvidia monitor works for me)

 

Well you system supports 2Gb (2 x 1Gb) of PC5300 667Mhz sodimm memory.
I would recommend getting one of these memory cards, to boost your system memory:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220078
If your system has 2 x 512mb cards in it now, then you can opt to buy one card to have 1.5Gb of memory, or you can buy two of the memory cards in order to get 2Gb of memory.

As mentioned, run msconfig, and shut off lots of unnecessary programs, they will eat up a lot of system resources.

K-TRON

 

I might be way off but, I seriously doubt RAM is going to show much improvement from how you describe. As you pointed out all or part could be perceived as you have been using a faster system. But I suspect there could be an actual slowdown. I suspect it is the HDD a Fujitsu 5400 80GB is a low density disk and it is only 5400, oh and a Fujitsu. Defraging likely would show some improvement. Upgrading HDD to either faster or denser one would likely solve all your problems. Why do I not think it is RAM? It is XP Home and that is plenty for that OS. If anyone disagrees please correct me. Your description is classic HDD. You go to open/close an application, well that is a HDD task, it has to be loaded into RAM or unloaded, from/to where? You got it! HDD. If you want to get some Idea if more RAM might help in other ways. Watch the HDD light when doing things. When surfing the light should not be going on. If it is then yea more RAM might help. When you open an application it is normal for the HDD light to turn on and more RAM will not stop that. I know that is not the fastest computer but is more than capable of running the applications you mentioned seamlessly. Good luck.

 

thanks. it's about to be degfragged!

 

Hello Again, 2 more questions for the notebook gurus...

1. If I go and turn services and programs off using the msconfig startup utility, does that actually speed up the boot? Or does it take just as much time (cause it has to reference the custom boot sequence) but after it's done there are less system resources being chewed up.

In an effort to speed up my wifes computer, I uninstalled 20 gb of crap, used msconfig and customized the startup, reformatted, and it's certainly waaaaay faster once it's booted, but it still takes a while to boot up and appears to hang a bit on bootup.

2. I have not done a reg-clean. I've always thought reg-cleans would be dangerous (no real bases for thinking that, other than messing with my reg has always been poo-pooed by my friends). Are there any free reg-cleaning utilities you guys use? If not, whats the simplest one I can buy that won't turn into pain-in-the-ass-with-pop-up-messages-all-the-time-ware?

Koooodoooo,
Thanks, Ryan.

 

Yes, if you shut off some unnecessary processes in the services tab, there will be less processes running, and thus your computer would boot a little faster, and be a little more responsive.
if after this, it still performs slow, I would recommend upgrading your harddrive to a high density 5400rpm drive or a 7200rpm drive.

K-TRON

 

I recommend doing a clean install, it will surely speed things up

 

I use Free registry cleaner and Crap cleaner at the same time. No problems.
Go to the windows part of the forum for advice, if you are still in doubt.