Upgrade or no???

S

safehaven

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 28, 2008
Messages
224
My father-in-law dropped his tower off to me last night so that I could fix it. He was complaining of excessive load times on web pages and the occasional "Virtual memory is low". So, I have been working on it and managed to get things running fairly smoothly. I disabled McAffee and a few other start ups. I have run SpyBot, Super AntiSpyware, AdAware, and HiJackThis. The system appears to be clean. I ran CCleaner to clean out the junk and that deleted about 1 GB of crap. I also bumped up the max page file to 1152. So all in all, it is running fairly smoothly.

The system is fairly old, built in Dec. '03. It is an AMD Athlon XP-2000, MSI K7N2GML mobo, 256 MB DDR PC3500, 40GB HD, and WinXP Home. It is only used for email and the web, NOTHING ELSE. I was going to tell him that he should put some RAM in it. The mobo will take 2GB. 2GB of DDR is right around $50 delivered. So then I got to thinking that maybe for a little more money, a new bare bones kit might be the way to go.

Given that the system will never be used for anything buy web and email, what would you do? Try to make the existing configuration work to is full potential? Put in some RAM? Or, recommend a new inexpensive system?
 
I'm of two minds about this. For starters, 2GB of RAM is the easiest, if not the only upgrade you could do for your father-in-law's machine. It should be enough, especially considering the purposes of this machine.

However, you could easily build a cheap "barebones" (motherboard, processor, RAM) setup for under $300 that could outperform your father-in-law's system. The problem is that you may need to justify it to your father-in-law.

For now, just get the RAM upgrade, adjust the virtual memory to match that amount (or let Windows handle the virtual memory), install a better AV (and schedule automatic weekly antivirus and antispyware sweeps for the computer), and hand the entire system back to your father-in-law. If he complains later about the computer being slow, have him front the purchase of a new system. (You can buy or build a new system that is suitable for his needs for under $500; there are many threads here based on the subject.)
 
Yeah, my original thought was just to go for the RAM. But when I saw that it would be about $50 shipped, I started second guessing myself. You can get DDR2 for half that.

I am guessing that he probably wouldn't balk at spending the $50. He'd probably spend $400 if I told him to. I think the RAM would help a lot and he'd probably be content.

If I give him the options, and he decides he does want to upgrade, is there a way to use his IDE HD on a SATA mobo? I should say, I see that there are converters, are there any issues with using them? If I can use his existing HD, I can probably get away with just a mobo, cpu and RAM. I do not really see a problem with his ATX mid-tower and 300W PSU.
 
safehaven said:
If I give him the options, and he decides he does want to upgrade, is there a way to use his IDE HD on a SATA mobo? I should say, I see that there are converters, are there any issues with using them? If I can use his existing HD, I can probably get away with just a mobo, cpu and RAM. I do not really see a problem with his ATX mid-tower and 300W PSU.
Click to expand...

Most of today's motherboards come with one IDE port, which can support up to two devices. If you really wanted to, you could reuse your father-in-law's IDE hard drive as well as one of his optical drives.

For a new system, however, I normally recommend getting as many new parts as possible -- just to minimize any compatibility or age issues. You could pick up a 250GB SATA hard drive for around $50 that would perform better than the IDE drive that he currently has.

But just so there's no confusion as towards my recommendation....

lt_shiro said:
I say upgrade...
Click to expand...
 
if it is just for web surfing and e-mailing

just upgrade the ram

I upped my P4 2.4Ghz from 512mb to 1Gb of memory
and I see great improvements
 
tiraides said:
Most of today's motherboards come with one IDE port, which can support up to two devices. If you really wanted to, you could reuse your father-in-law's IDE hard drive as well as one of his optical drives.
Click to expand...

Ah, I see now... I was looking at the specs for a couple of mobos on Newegg and I didn't see IDE listed. I rechecked and still don't see IDE listed in the specs, but I see the port clear as day in the pictures.

My main reason for wanting to reuse the HD is just pure laziness on my part. I already have too may hours into running scans, deleting files, and optimizing performance on this ancient machine. If he wants to upgrade, I don't want to take the time to do a back up and then do a clean install, update everything, install programs, and re-sign up all of his accounts.

That is, unless, I am mistaken and I cannot simply hook the HD up to the new parts and expect it to be plug and play???
 
You wouldn't be able to just plug in the old hard drive into the new system and continue right where you've left off. In most cases, you would have to reformat the drive.

But again, since you've already cleaned up the computer, you don't need to take drastic action. Just upgrade the RAM and go from there.
 
OK... Thanks for the advice! I'm just gonna tell him to stick the RAM in it for now and call it good.

Maybe you can help me understand something though. I did a rough addition of all the RAM used and all of the virtual memory used. At the time I did it, the RAM usage was about 100MB and the virtual mem was about 154MB. The system says it has 223MB of RAM available. Does the system only use a portion of the physical, 100MB of the 223MB and then start using the page file, so that it has some physical always in reserve? If I install 2GB of RAM, will it use, say, 1GB of the RAM, leaving 1GB in reserve?

I know adding RAM should help, I just want to know why it is that RAM will help when appearances make it look like the existing RAM isn't being fully used.

Thanks again!!!
 
You're most likely correct -- the OS probably configured the virtual memory on its own and then split up the resources so that all of the physical memory wasn't used. The fact that you only had so little actual RAM didn't help matters, as it takes a lot of resources to switch things from physical to virtual memory and vice versa.

The 2GB upgrade should eliminate much of the problem, as you'll have around 2-4GB of combined (physical and virtual) memory to work with.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top