What hardware do you need to add or upgrade to make your computer run faster? Is it more memory or hard drive?

Question

I started with 512Mb, that came with my HP pavillion slimline, Intel CPU 420 @ 106GHz, I just added another 512Mb. System properties show total RAM 960MB, shouldn't that be 1024? Windows media player 10 tells me I'm low on memory when I try to use it, and computer is slightly faster in some ways after the upgrade, but slower loading paging on line than it was before. What does it take??

Answer 1

It might be hard drive space, defiantly worth checking, also, when you start up your computer there are some programs that load themselves in the RAM so it appears that they start faster. If these build up they can take a considerable amount of memory space, slowing your computer down. If you go to start, run, then type msconfig then hit enter a box will show up on screen. Click on the startup tab and uncheck anything you don’t need at start up like quicktime. If you don’t know what something is google it. If you are still unsure then don’t uncheck it. Then restart your computer after clicking ok. Make sure it still works and see if your performance has improved any. Good luck.

Answer 2

your system should be running smoothly with 1Gb of RAM. The slowdown comes from probably too many background processess - Start>Run>Msconfig - check out the startup processes - if u have anything more than 10 items, u need to go thru all those items and uncheck (disable) them. Reboot and see how it goes. u need only your antivirus and maybe adsl modem to be started up when your system boots up. The rest are all not necessary.
if u need them, u can alway run it when u want it or u can enable again by ticking the box in the startup option.

and if u have not done any housekepping, u may want to download Adaware to scan and remove all the other rogues background processes as well. a major cause of pc slow down.

Answer 3

To make your system faster u need to have
1. Faster processor speed
2. Sufficient RAM(primary memory)
Here u have mentioned that u added 2 512Mb RAMs and still your comp showing low memory while running WMP10
then u may have lots of idle programs running.
Check for those and get your comp virus cleaned as well...
I guess two 512Mb RAM's are sufficient to run any desktop application meant for users...

Answer 4

You can upgrade your processor, your RAM should be fine unless you are running TONS of things in your system tray and/or lots of new games. You could get a 10k RPM hard drive, but then you have to reload the whole OS.

Try cleaning up all your tmp files, delete all IE cookies, history, and file, update your anti-virus, run a full scan, and defrag.

Answer 5

If you got about 1,000 MB of memory, then you shouldn't need to upgrade more RAM. Why don't you check to see how much free space you have left on your hard drive.

Answer 6

low space on your hard drive could slow the pc down or there are too many open applications (which means lots of processes running) that eats up the virtual mem of your pc.

Answer 7

106 ghz should be all you need. lol.