A Slow Celeron 466 computer

[Salamander]

I have a celeron 466 comp using m747 8mb AGP graphic card built-in mobo and 32mb. it seems very slow. and one day i went to use my friends PII 300 comp with 64mb of ram and it was way (i mean at least twice as fast) as my computer. why is that? is it becuase i have a 32mb ram. does it make that much of a difference? or is it mother mobo?

[Alzarius]

Well, if the 8 meg graphics chip doesn't have it's own memory and is drawing off your 32 megs of system ram, then you effectively have 24 megs of system ram. And yes, going from 32 to 64 megs of ram can make a big difference. 32 megs is really nothing anymore. A lot of programs use 32 as the minimum requirement or even the recommended requirement, but think about it. Having just enough memory for a minimum requirement or just enough for the recommended one usually isn't going to do you a whole lot on the performance department. You've prolly got standard PC 66 ram Dimms in there and since you are using a PcChips board(like me) you should go with PC100 memory. Maybe snatch a 64 meg PC100 chip or 2. You'll see a heck of a performance increase. And no, unless your board is defective, the lack of speed is not do to the motherboard. There will be a small decrease due to using a cheaper motherboard, but definately NOT a major decrease. Heck, my M715, with a Celeron 400, 64 megs of ram and a 4 meg Graphics Blaster Extreme card really flies along. So, all in all, I'd gather you need more memory. Maybe a good bit more if that graphics chip is sucking the 8 megs for itself from your system memory.

[AuraEdge]

Ram....without a doubt
64 is the bare minimum for most decent comps these days..128 is recommended

[Martin]

yep ram no doubt

[Salamander]

okay i see thanks

[Salamander]

can it also because i have an older version of bios for my mobo and graphic card?

[Salamander]

can it also because i have an older version of bios for my mobo and graphic card?

[bigslammer]

new graphics drivers may help with the rendering in games but definitely and this sounds redundant but more RAM /forum/smile.gif. If the video uses your RAM and the OS uses the probably the rest of your memory then you're running on virtual memory most of the time and this is super sloooooow. also try disabling the programs at startup. type "msconfig" in the RUN command and check out what programs are loading at startup.

[Salamander]

so are u saying that it would be better if i install my old 4mb matrox 220 pci card to my computer and disable my biult-in agp graphic card would be better, since pci slot doesn't hog my ram mem rite?

[Alzarius]

Well, yes and no. If you disable the AGP chip and plug in the PCI, that would free up the 8 megs of ram, but...

1. This is the equivalent of ripping out an 8 cylinder engine and dropping in a 6 cylinder engine because it uses less gas. You're going to take a major performance hit with anything that runs through that graphics card. AGP is far better then your PCI card and with more memory even.

2. You need to get more RAM. More RAM. Really. Forget about putting the old card in. Get more RAM. You'll be MUCH happier. I would suggest a minimum of an extra 64 megs of RAM.

3. A bios update for the AGP chip will most likely not give you much of any peformance increase. You may see some increase, but unless there was a major problem with the old BIOS or they did some major awesome update, you won't see any super fast increases. BIOS updates usually just fix problems, maybe add this and that, but usually don't turbo charge your card.