Why is my Dell PC still an under-achiever despite all of my upgrades?

Question

I have a 3 year-old Dell 2350 Dimension with Home XP SP-2, all MS updates, new 160-ATA Seagate @ 7200, 1GB DDR SDRAM @ 266, Celeron 2.0, Intel 845GL, PCI: 33 MHz Bus, BIOS chip: 2 Mb (256 KB), Clock: 400-MHz, hooked-up to Comcast Broadband. The system is free of virus, malware, etc. It gets over-loaded too easily, slow surfing, CPU gets a workout maxxing out, etc. I thought that with the upgrades I made I'd have a decent workhorse but I'm beginning to think that I should have just spent the post-tax dollars on a new PC. Too late now. I be quite the embicil. I hope that whatever my slug needs will not require re-formatting, of course, as I have just gotten things configured the way I like, except for the so-so performance. Good advice will be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance. Dave

Answer 1

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/xp_fixes.html <

Answer 2

First off let me commend you for being one of the very few who have the intelligence to let us know your system! Dont ever be too sure that your system is free of malware....most people dont realize that protection, whether its free or paid for does not detect all malware. It takes months for even the best detection software companies to find new malware and then produce a tool that will get rid of it. I dont even use virus protection because it slows down your system to a snails pace. I have learned through many trials and tribulations (and believe me I have had to learn it the hard way) that the best protection is in the users brain. So many people firstly dont understand that very little is actually free on the net! If you download frequent free stuff I will gaurantee you will at least end up with an unwanted toolbar on your browser or some sort of so called browser helper. Most so called free music sites are full of adware, spyware, trojans, hijackers, and malware! Your system may be a little slow but it should be way more than fast enough to browse the net! Another common misbelief is that people think they need 3 gigahertz of processor speed to browse the net. Not True! Lastly, most people dont understand how a system works. I had a lady come in the other day and said she just bought a 150 gig hard drive and her system is still too slow. You can buy a bazillion bits of storage but if you only have 64 megs of ram it aint gonna change a thing! Upgrade your ram to its max is the very first thing to do. I would also like to add, people seem to think that they need all that funky crap running in the background...I.E. weatherbug, messenger, tons of programs that when installed were set to run in the background arent needed and eat up valuable ram! Use msconfig and turn anything and everything off you dont need. I have seen people with winzip, adobe reader, creative labs crap and a plethora of other junk that needs not to run! When you need this stuff it will open anyway! I monitor my task manager often to find out what has snuck in and decided it should run too. If you do download music, keep in mind, while its downloading it is also chewing up 75 percent of your bandwidth. Good luck! Dave here too

p. s.you are not an imbecile! You would be surprised at some of the absolute boobs I run into! 99.99 percent of users aint got a clue!

Answer 3

Check what is running in the backround, start->run->msconfig and see what is starting up at boot. Check that all the drivers are running correctly, most likely it is a bunch of backround apps that installed themselves to run in the backround by defualt.

Your RAM size is OK, but the speed is a little slow. WIndows is not very good at managing memory so the more you have the better. If you are using IE try firefox or Opera and see if there is any improvment. Also look in the task manager to see what the memory load is, this will tell you if lots of things are running at once and eating up mem. Sometimes a bad driver or softwre app can cause memory leakage tracking it down can be difficult.

Answer 4

First, look at your message: 1GB DDR SDRAM @266..., clock 400Mhz... do you not see an issue here? a 400 clock is a 200 FSB (front side bus) but you are using RAM rated for 266 which requires a 133 FSB... since the RAM requires a slower BUS, the entire system will run at the slower bus. Your system is running at 133 which IS slow. Recommendations: speed up the BUS.

Answer 5

First of all, you definitely don't need more than 1GB of RAM. I'm STILL pissed that I spent $100 on a second 1GB stick of RAM for my gaming PC. For the less than the price of another gig of RAM, you could buy a processor that will fit in your motherboard, and won't require you to replace your RAM, but will be much, much faster. Here's a 2.53 Ghz P4B: http://www.starmicro.net/detail.aspx?ID=114 and here's a 2.66 P4B for $15 more: http://www.starmicro.net/detail.aspx?ID=117 and for $95, you can get yourself a 2.8 Ghz P4B: http://www.starmicro.net/detail.aspx?ID=550

Just realize that the heatsink that's on your Celeron isn't enough. You'll have to get a better heatsink, with any of those processors. This is the one I would buy, if I were you: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16835106606

Answer 6

your weak link is the celeron, i believe the intel 845 chipset will support pentium 4, go to the intel website and lookup the 845GL chipset http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/d845gvsr/index.htm

i looked it up it supports P4 but not with HT technology and it is socket 478 those are selling real cheap as the lga 775 is the standard now you may need a BIOS update to make it work

Answer 7

Go through msconfig.exe do a defrag, run spy-bot search and destroy, AVG antivirus, Ad-Aware, (all free & safe downloads) dump any programs that you don't need or use. See if this helps the "Slug" turn into a "Racehorse".