Need help making my computer faster

[pokelda]

Re: Need help making my computer faster

oic

[greekanilater]

Re: Need help making my computer faster

am i the only person to say that linux is worth it. my compomter died once allready and its amost at the end of its life but linux is making possible. and its fast.

[Makilaz]

Re: Need help making my computer faster

Linux is amazing. I'd recommend switching, if you know what you're doing, otherwise the only thing I can see wrong with your comp (besides RAM) is the video card. Intel makes horrible video cards.

[Xapti]

Re: Need help making my computer faster

(I know this reply is late, but there has been a ressurection recently)

Linux would be faster mostly likely, depending on the distro used.
Thing is, it has really bad support for games and many other applications, so unless you run dual boot (which is possible, but not very convenient), or could manage with windows emulator, it's not much of an option.

First thing that's easy to tell: you need a bigger paging file. It's almost used up. A paging file is like memory, except it uses the harddrive, so it's slower. If you have lots of memory, the computer won't really need to use the paging file much at all (it does not mean you should disable it), which is good because it's slow.

Second thing: close all unnecessary processes, and remove them from the startup list. There's a horde of potential memory suckers which can hog your computer's resources; these processes should individually be examined, and judged. If you don't know what a process is, online search it before you do something.
A (FREE) program that is more useful to do this than standard Windows Task Manager is called "Process Explorer".

The third thing, somewhat related to the second, but requires different measures, is to scan and remove all malware. Spyware, adware, viruses, whatever. They can all cause MAJOR problems for system performance.

These three things are the major things which will inprove your performance without changing your hardware.
Things like registry cleaners, and disk defragmentation is not very beneficial for performance, since NTFS (windows XP's file system) works well even fragmented. It's still not a bad thing to do though.

Hardware wise, The most important thing would be to get a video card (the current "THING" you have is not a card, and is totally unacceptable for any form of gamer. These are for BASIC display functionality!), but it's also probably tied with getting more memory. If it's just for playing FFR (or other old/small games), then you would not need the extra memory as much as you'd need a video card (as long as you increase your paging file).

When it comes to the amount of memory you should get, 1gig sounds good, since you can use a matched pair of two 512s. I hope you got the right speed for your CPU, otherwise you'd be running slower than you could be, or you'd have paid more for fast memory you can't take advantage of. You would no longer need the 256MB, since it may be running at a slower speed, and wouldn't be running in dual-channel, so it could hinder performance. You would definitely not want to get more than 1GB of memory for your current system, since the system itself isn't a very great performer anymore. Next time you need more memory past 1GB (or some other upgrade), you should definitely just buy a new computer instead.

While by todays Standard, a 3.2GHz Intel is not a great performer, it is far superior than your crappy video and memory, which are totally out of sync with it, causing bottlenecks. This is typical behaviour of crappy ass computer retailers, since they advertise the CPU the most, and think/know that it's all most naive computer users look for. (nowadays this is improving, since people are getting smarter, they can't get away with that crap anymore)