My parents have a computer with a Pentium 4 521 processor and Intel 945GNT mobo. recently they've been telling me that it's starting to get very sluggish. i advised them to remove zone alarm IS which the suite they were using.they got a trial version of mcafee instaed and it was slightly better but it's mainly the xp boot up time which is annoying. it's using 512MB RAM which is fair considering they use it just for emails and chatting. if anyone has any suggestions for speeding this rig up please...the big question- since my 2140 is starting to feel a little old would an unsupported CPU work on the above mobo?anyone have experience of using unsupported processors?
you want at least 2gigs for any OS. 512 is too thin, and ram is dirt cheap. you'll need DDR2-667. the 945GNT can use a pentium D; recommended is the D 900 series. you'll have to find them used, but it's a nice upgrade over a P4.
512 is well enough for xp How much other crap is running in the background? How long since there was a registry clean up and drive defrag? I installed xp on an old athlon800 mhz earlier with 512 ram and it boots up in about 20 seconds. Add antivirus and especially phone software and the boot time stretches. Suggest checking out the windows malware (bottom of the OS) section for suggestions about cleaning and defragging the drive and trimming the "run on startup" processes.
agreed in that 2gigs of ram is overkill just for emailing & chatting on the net. check for spyware & malware as that will knock a p4 down to p1 in speed.
It's either a hardware/driver problem or bloated antispyware programs causing the problem. Do a scandisk (with the box to fix errors checked) on all drives. corrupted files will slow the drives access times. Check and make sure your hard drives are set to DMA and not to PIO. The p4 cpu is very fast, if the cpu usage is a 100 percent even when doing nothing, you might have a hardware problem either the onboard soundcard, usually installing a PCI soundcard can fix this. If you have any usb memory cards connected when booting up that may also slowdown the computer. Your ram is also good, I've ran xp with 256mb with no problems. I don't think getting more ram will speed it up, when I installed another 512mb on one of my computers I couldn't tell the difference in performance. zone alarm is good if it's just the firewall, if it's got the antispyware suite then it will slow you down. My advice is to remove any antispyware programs. And instead use the free "returnil" anytime you will be going on the internet or checking your e-mail attachments. Returnil sepereates your hard drive from the internet, everything runs in memory. this is my computer security (very light and fast no slowdown) 1. zone alarm firewall basic (not the suite) 2. avg 8.0 free version 3. firefox browser 4. returnil virtual program free version http://www.majorgeeks.com/Returnil_Virtual_System_Personal_Edition_d5702.html
