PC performance with XP

[Neil Jones]

However I'm concerned about trying to buy (more cheaply?) from my local pc shop(s) instead. ie the details they seem to have for such things are quite generic and it would be just my luck to buy the wrong thing ...

The thing with Crucial is, the stuff they offer you for your board they say will work, or you get a refund/exchange. At the local shop, it's usually generic so your board may still not like the first stick the shop gives you.

Should I take my current RAM from this pc with me to show them, and just hope the assistant knows what it is or offers a correctly compatible alternative ?

Take the whole base unit, the people in the shop can then shove in varying sticks and find something that it likes. Because there are at least four different types of memory alone of that variety, this would be the best thing to do.

But please don't take it to PC World. Aas they will usually tell you its a writeoff and flog you something new.

By the way, are 'Memory Sticks' something quite different? Presumably I shouldn't be thinking about those ? from what I've looked up they look different and seem to be 'flash memory' whatever that is ...

Some people use the term "memory stick" interchangeably; it can refer to either a stick of memory that you put inside your computer, or a Pen Drive/USB Drive/Flash Drive that you shove in a USB port and it shows up in My Computer as a removeable drive. MP3 players are classed as Pen Drives as well as they have extra functionality to play the music.

[fernando]

thanks again Neil.

[cwathen]

Hmm, the 48x CD unit won't be able to perform all that fast as the speed is limited by the rest of the system.

Any CD-ROM drive rated at faster than 12x is only able to reach it's maximum rated speed if the CD is full due to the use of CAV motors to achieve the (largely fantastical) speeds they quote - a '56x' (which I think is where they gave up trying to increase the numnbers) CD-ROM drive certainly cannot deliver anything like this speed generally. I wouldn't worry too much about a 48x unit being unable to reach it's maximum speed - in practice it's performance would be indistinguishable from a 12x unit anyway.

And again, USB1 devices when your modem can quite happily chug along at USB2.

The modem identified itself as a 'Speedtouch 330 USB'. The Alcaltel Speedtouch 330 was pretty much universally supplied with <=512K ADSL connections, in which case having USB2 would make no difference.

The problem you have with these older boards is finding a stick of memory that it likes.

DIMM memory is supposed to be able to adjust to the speed of the motherboard. Similarly, the motherboard is supposed to be able to adjust to the speed of the memory. If you add new PC133 memory to PC100 memory on a PC100 board, then the new memory should just slow down to 100Mhz. Similarly, if you introduce an old PC66 DIMM to a newer PC100 board with PC100 memory, then the whole board should slow down to 66Mhz.

Although in practice there can be problems with asking this of your hardward, I've always found that, as long as all memory is of the same type then you'll have no problems. So wheras you might have problems adding a 'modern' PC133 128MB DIMM to the existing PC100 128MB module, there will be no problems at all in simply removing the existing 128MB PC100, and installing 2 new PC133 256MB DIMMs.

[fernando]

Well, I've enquired with my local shop and they have said they can only point me to their generic SDRAM as shown HERE: -

This was in response to me showing them crutial.com's recommendations which are (for 128MB) : -

1)
Module Details:

* Crucial Part Number: CT16M64S8D7E
* Module Size: 128MB
* Package: 168-pin DIMM
* Feature: SDRAM, PC133
* Specs: SDRAM, PC133 • CL=2 • Unbuffered • Non-parity • 133MHz • 3.3V • 16Meg x 64

2)
Module Details:

* Crucial Part Number: CT16M64S8D75
* Module Size: 128MB
* Package: 168-pin DIMM
* Feature: SDRAM, PC133
* Specs: SDRAM, PC133 • CL=3 • Unbuffered • Non-parity • 133MHz • 3.3V • 16Meg x 64

So, are any of you confident that any of the products shown on that local shop's page will work alongside my current 128 MB (PC100 SDRAM) ?
I can only really afford to buy 1 128MB module at the moment and would prefer to buy locally if possible, rather than on the internet.

thanks a lot.

[fernando]

By the way, I don't know the differences, but when my pc boots I can see a quick display that says 'System RAM PC133' whereas the Everest program says PC100.

Here is some further detail from Everest's Motherboard analysis section :

Memory Bus Properties
Bus Type SDR SDRAM
Bus Width 64-bit
Real Clock 133 MHz
Effective Clock 133 MHz
Bandwidth 1066 MB/s

??
!

[fernando]

In case anyone's loosely interested in my memory saga (bear in mind that fiddling inside the pc case is pretty much virgin territory for me)...

My other pc (AMD Duron with Jetway motherboard and SiS hardware) with the failing hard drive has a 256MB RAM module in it, so I decided to try putting the 'good' hard drive into that pc, which actually seemed to work. However I seemed to have to run a 'repair' on the xp installation using the xp cd to get things running properly.

I then decided to push my luck and see if I could add my 128MB RAM module from the Intel pc to the AMD pc's 256MB, which again somehow seems to have worked. I appear to now have about 380MB RAM, so I'm updating drivers etc and will probably carry on with this set up now.

I'm not yet aware of any dynamic speed performance improvement, but all seems to be moving along a bit more swiftly and smoothly. Also, windows are closing cleanly rather than painfully 'scrolling down' to a close.

[cwathen]

The other performance boost which you can do is to disable system restore. Although I'm sure many would recommend against it, if you aren't regularly titting about with your system then it's not really necessary, and it can quickly be re-enabled before you do anything major.