Memory Problem

Iconic

I am trying to sort out slow performance on a friends HP Pavillion ze 5600 laptop running XP Home.

At present it's got 256mb RAM so it's running like a dog! I have ordered two sticks of 512mb (the maximum it can take) but I still think it will be quite slow.
HP advise that notebooks reserve several megabytes of memory for the graphics chipset so in effect the maximum RAM will be less then 800mb.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00035793&cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&product=385142

I have ensured that all except a couple of essential progs load at start up although the 'Belkin Wireless USB Utililty' has a mind of it's own and starts up! I have also ensured it's virus and spyware free and done a defrag.

Is there anything else I can do?

bigmacca81625

tbh you'll be surprised what a couple of sticks of ram can do for a pc!

some people suggest, buy a new processor etc.. but if you get that extra ram in, and ensure its clean, then you should see a really big improvement in speed, if it did have 256 with 200 reserved, then your looking at it only having 56mb of ram, windows xp will choke at that much.

When the ram comes, if it isnt faster, come back and post again

kwikbreaks

When that lappy was made 256MB was probably OK but times have moved on and now with multi-tabbed browsers, content rich websites running flash and complex javascript just running a browser is likely to need more.

You won't upgrade it from Lada to Lambo performance by ugrading to 1GB but Ill guarantee the difference will be quite noticeable.

GunJack

Also, you can access the BIOS on startup and reduce the shared graphics RAM....reduce it to the min possible value (you should get options from 8/16/32/64/etc. RAM to use, go for the minimum it'll let you). This'll give you the max available, and 1GB with some shared for graphics is absolutely fine for XP to run well. p.s. Make sure you set the pagefile to System Managed too

John_Gray

Iconic wrote: »

I am trying to sort out slow performance on a friends HP Pavillion ze 5600 laptop running XP Home.
HP advise that notebooks reserve several megabytes of memory for the graphics chipset so in effect the maximum RAM will be less then 800mb.

Yes - wait until you've put the 1 GB of memory into the laptop before doing anything else. That amount of memory is usually more than adequate for XP, even with some memory stolen by the graphics card.