New Computer?

[brandon184]

Im running an old Pentium 133Mhz with 16MB RAM and a 1.01 GIG Hard Drive.. Within the last few months, I've noticed the hard drive access time slowing down, and the processor a bit sluggish, and the LED light indicating hard drive access sometimes goes crazy, because it seems to go crazy every time I try to do ANYTHING.. is this is sign of a upgrade or something? New Computer?

[HOTRODk62]

brandon, sounds like to me, you at the very least need lots more ram. I've never seen a computer that would run 95 or 98 (windows) with only 16mb of ram or less that didn't thrash the hd, constantly, it's just not enough memory for it to run properly. As far as a new computer goes, it is sort of borderline I'd say. For playing games it's basically worthless, but for just word processing or surfing the web, it's plenty adequate, if it had say 64 mb ram. Also remember to keep it defragged religiously, and do all the speed tweaks you can such as speeding up bios memory timings, tweaking windows, setting permanent swapfile, just optimize it really good. Theres tons of websites on doing this...

[DavidX]

It's more likely a sign that you've practically filled up your hard disk! The constant LED activity is indicating that your swap file has no room to manoevre; it has to keep moving old info to make room for new.

Time for two things:
a) Delete all the programs/files you don't really need and make more space.
b) Run scandisk and then defragment your hard disk. Both these utilities come with Windows.

If you really want to improve the performance (without a major upgrade) then do two more things:
a) Buy a larger hard drive. (You can keep your old one too, if you run the new one as a slave. Also, move your swap file to the newer, larger and faster drive.)
b) Increase your RAM. 16Mb is way too small these days and RAM is cheap right now.

DavidX

[DavidX]

oops! Looks like HOTRODk62 beat me to it while I was still posting!

[DavidX]

Darn! As if getting beaten to it is not bad enough, I also noticed that this same question got posted twice. It's annoying when that happens! You don't know which version to answer http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

[This message has been edited by DavidX (edited 05-31-99).]