XP slow

jasmin10

Thank you all so much.

Great info Bat999 and Anne-MArie. I am going to Crucial website to have a look at the RAM. I have a rough idea on how to fit it, I guess it's just knowing which slot it goes into but I will look for the instructions for it - thanks Anne-Marie.

Sam

home_alone

Look at the link Norton does slow down your pc a lot its the 10th post (1dec)http://www.tiscali.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=116262

gary

AMO

jasmin10 wrote:

Thank you all so much.

Great info Bat999 and Anne-MArie. I am going to Crucial website to have a look at the RAM. I have a rough idea on how to fit it, I guess it's just knowing which slot it goes into but I will look for the instructions for it - thanks Anne-Marie.

Sam

Sam, I have upgraded many PCs from the year 2000 or so. XP is a lot more slower than ME. Memory is really the only thing you want to upgrade before buying a new base unit. It's not worth investing any more into that PC.

I will say that its likely that you will find that your existing memory will have to be taken out to put the new memory in as they will most likely use all the existing banks of memory.

More importantly, for memory for your machine it should be fairly cheap. You might want to consider upgrading the memory so that the amount in your machine site between 768Mb and 1Gb.

It depends a lot on what you do, but with a machine so old, you will find that if you have that little bit more memory, whilst it won't help you too much with loading applications etc, what it will do is that once everything is loaded up everything will run from fast memory and it will keep your PC running for a while longer.

It will also mean that you won't find performance degradation hitting you so hard when you happen to have one or more utilities loaded in the background like your virus checkers etc.

AMO

jasmin10

I am going to get rid of Norton (*** another waste of money at least it was only £25), and go back to AVG and Zone Alarm.

I will see if this helps with starting up and applications.

Thanks for all your tips

Sam

C_Ronaldo

yes i recommend getting rid of norton, its a drain on the memory

jasmin10

Right got rid of Norton and it is 100 x faster so thank you again. I am just about to download AVG but have a question about Zone Alarm. I didn't realise that XP had it's own firewall. Shall I use this or download Zone Alarn? I think that if the XP one is OK I may as well use it as it is already taking up space - what do you think?

bat999

Yes, try AVG for certain.
Probably best/easiest to try Windows XP firewall first.

Browntoa

XP's built in one is crap

it will only block incoming attacks, a real firewall like Zonealarm will warn you if something is attempting to access the internet, once you have done the initial set-up of zonealarm if anything tries to access the net use google to find out what the file is....or come back here and ask