1.8 Ghz, 480 MB Ram. What if I just want animated screen savers and visualizations(More details)?

Question

How much faster do I need to get? What
about the RAM?

I have a fish screen saver a Nautica. It works
best if I minimize performance characteristics,
just bare bones SS without enhancing graphics a
lot.

Now, someday I may be able to use my favorite
player again(Winamp), and I like to watch
visualization.

I don't play any games, unless they are graphically
primitive online games.

Thanks for any enlightenment. I have a
Compaq Presario.

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Answer 1

Sounds more like video card issue. Screen savers don't usually push the PC's CPU around too much, if the video card has the proper hardware to run the 3D calculations through the on-board GPU. The stated system memory size leads me to believe you're running a motherboard chipset video adapter with 32MB of shared system RAM. Those are usually crud for any 3D apps. A decent non-gamer 3D video card is in the 50-70 buck range. Make sure your system has an AGP or PCI Express slot for a video adapter. Judging from the system's apparent age, I'm guessing AGP.

Answer 2

Most of these screen savers (including the ones that come with WinXP Plus) like the fish tank or the space walk, etc. require a certain amount of VIDEO RAM - usually at least 64MB. Some may even require a graphics card with dedicated video RAM.

From your computer spec, I would assume that you really have 512MB of system RAM less 32MB of "shared" RAM being used by an on-board graphics chip which gives you 480MB of RAM for Windows - makes sense.

You have quite a bit of RAM, so you could try to increase the "shared" RAM that the video is using. This is usually a BIOS option. When powering up your computer, look for the message "Press ??? to enter setup" - the ??? is usually but it depends on the BIOS you have. Press it and go into the BIOS setup and look for the shared graphics memory size. Change it to more memory, save and exit.

Be sure not to change anything else if you don't know what it does - you can always restart your machine and return a setting to its original value if things don't work - so keep track of exactly what you change. Or in the very worst case you can reset all values to default but I wouldn't recommend that not knowing anything about your computer.

Really the best answer is to add a real graphics card to your computer. Dedicated slot video cards are the best (AGP 4x, AGP 8x, PCI-Express), but it can be complicated to determine what kind of card your computer supports. Your motherboard manual or on-line manual (look for the manufacturer model printed on the motherboard and search the internet) will tell you exactly what type of card is supported.

AGP (short connector, set way back from the rear of the case)
PCI-E (long connector, lower than PCI)

I would suggest getting one with at least 128MB and a DVI output for an LCD monitor - very nice steady picture.

At the very least, ALL computers support PCI graphics cards and they are normally low end cards which are not that expensive - so that is the easiest choice. Video cards are very easy to install and most computers have an open dedicated or a open PCI slot to accept a graphics card.