Sluggish performance on a top computer. Help!

4

4keatimj

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 16, 2003
Messages
1,327
Hey all, good to see the forums back. Anyway, i have this problem (my dad's actually). He has a P4 2.8Ghz, ASUS P4PE mobo, 512meg of DDR-333 (i think it is ECC-RAM, more on that later), GeForce 4 440MX vid card. Basically, hi computer runs like crap. He runs Win 98, and although he probably shouldn't, it uses up RAM not doing much. Sitting idle it uses 50% of RAM. Playing games (he plays flight sims, mainly Jane's Attack Squadron and Combat Flight Simulator 3: Battle for Europe) isn't good either, it chokes down when quite frankly it shouldn't. I tweaked the swap file (set up a semi-permanent swap file and turned on Conservative swapfile usage), but i shouldn't have to tweak it too much. I know the vid card isn't great, but the system as a whole is really good and beats the system specs for his games by 400% (literally), could it be the ECC RAM he has? The BIOS says nothing about ECC, but a DMI explorer i have says it is 64-bit ECC-RAM. Could this be slowing the system down? To be honest, i am at a loss to explain what happening here.
Thanks,
4keatimj
 
First, Windows 98 from what I hear doesn't like large amounts of ram (512>).

Secondly, Windows 98 alone will be a bottleneck for that computer (imo).

Thirdly, a Geforce 4 MX440 isn't a high end card and can't be expected to play high end games unless in lower resolutions, it's less likely to be this as you can use lower resolutions. I'd go with the above 2.
 
To be honest, i didn't think the vid card made that much difference. Esp. on games that are a few years ols (well, Jane's is).
 
Well, some of the software proggie that list RAM type fuck up on ECC all the time, so unless you pull the chip out and look and see that it is ECC, i'd say it's probably not. Most of the time PCs that aren't designed for ECC memory won't boot w/ ECC in them.
 
oooh, ok then. I guess i'll tweak his system to the max then. Thanks all!
 
why the fuk is he using windows 98 on a system like that? like someone said, windows 98 will get CONFUSED when u have 512mb or more ram. its a old and crappy os. why not use xp? its only 88dollers on newegg.
 
The Donut said:
First, Windows 98 from what I hear doesn't like large amounts of ram (512>).

Secondly, Windows 98 alone will be a bottleneck for that computer (imo).

Thirdly, a Geforce 4 MX440 isn't a high end card and can't be expected to play high end games unless in lower resolutions, it's less likely to be this as you can use lower resolutions. I'd go with the above 2.
Click to expand...

What he said. Just for emphasis. Runnin win98 is extremely fast (boots up almost instanenously, though a bit slower than winMe) your best bet for performance is to get upgraded to windows 2k or xp (preferably). otherwise, that seems kind of a waste for a system like that. Most newer games want XP too.
 
might want to check for spyware,it will bog a system really bad no matter what he does
 
yep could very well be spyware causing this or even viruses.......

Do a google search on

Spybot: Search & Destory
Adaware
CWShredder

Download these free spyware scanner programs, they will find spyware and safely delete them dont forgot to get the updates!
 
Upgrade to XP!!!!!! My dad was running T-Bird 1.0 Ghz with 768 Ram, and GeForce Ti4200... was slow as hell.. Upgraded to XP and it was like a completely different computer. Also.. check out www.ad-aware.com so you can check the machine for spy-ware.

Good luck!
 
Windows 98 can't efficently use more than 256 MB of RAM. Time for XP bro :)
 
Ugh... On a system of that caliber, you need to be running a proper operating system. If you had maybe a PII 500, with 128-256 Megs of Ram than Win98 would be appropriate.

-As for your problem

3 x 184-pin DIMM Sockets support max. 2GB PC2700/PC2100 (FSB533) or PC2100/PC1600 (FSB400) non-ECC DDR SDRAM memory

http://www.asus.com/mb/socket478/p4pe/specification.htm

Right from Asus's website. This PC is not compatable with ECC Ram.

Cheers,
 
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