How to speed up performance of a grumbly Dell Dimension DE051 (Celeron processor) ?

bgscotty

Hello gang!

I'd welcome any advice/ tips on the following query.

I have an 15 month old Dell Dimension DE051.

(Technical spec: Intel (R) Celeron (R) CPU 2.8 GHz 2.79 GHz, 256 MB of RAM).

(C drive: 20.2 GB used / 51.2 GB unused)

Lately, the hard drive has been sounding as if it's working a bit noisier ("grumbling") and longer when it's first switched on and intermittently during the day. When this happens tasks are a little sluggish and boxes take longer to open and close.

I suspect much of the problem is caused by loads of programmes (e.g. Dreamweaver, Flash, Adobe Photoshop) on the other user's profile which I will be removing soon when they get their own laptop.

In the meantime, I regularly defragment and have tried all the basic performance housekeeping tasks.

I would welcome any advice on how I can speed up performance in terms of upgrading or adding on to the memory, processor etc.

I have recently paid off the pc and would prefer, if possible, not to have to purchase a new desktop.

Thank you all in advance.

Scotty

motorguy

Easy, upgrade the RAM to 512Mb, remove all the stuff you dont really need on the machine, run decent antivirus, then anti spyware s/w - check out www.filehippo.com, that should do the trick.

Failing that reinstall O/S and drivers.

bookduck

I'd defrag it twice. The second time would be the normal way.

The first time: to be honest the best result ever I have obtained was not from defragging a disk, but by using winternals/systernals page defragmentor. Think this product is now this http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/PageDefrag.mspx

moneymonkey£

If you are using windows Xp you could try disabling the indexing service (which is only really needed if you search for items on your harddrive/s very often) This may give you a small but welcome speed boost.

You can disable the service from:
Start > Run > services.msc > Indexing service > Stop it, then choose ‘disabled’ fro the startup option.

May be worth a try anyway and at worst you can turn it back on again!

albertross_2

You need more ram

www.crucial.com/uk

if you don't have at least 512, your PC will be swapping, and thrashing the hard disk a lot.

Also try cleaning out the crap. https://www.ccleaner.com

bgscotty

Thank you everyone for the excellent advice.

I'm going to upgrade the RAM.

Could anyone tell me how I do this in practical terms i.e. do I buy some item of equipment from, for example, PC World? And what do I actually do with it to upgrade the RAM of my pc?

(basic I know!!)

Many thanks in advance.

Scotty

albertross_2

instructions are on crucial.com