Suggestions helpful

I wanted some suggestions on how to boost the darn slow speed of my computer. Now, before you say "get more RAM," bear in mind this: I have an HP with a 1.3 Celeron processor, 128 MB of RAM, I believe integrated video, and Windows XP Home. My point is this: Ive heard that XP and celerons do not perform well together. Should I resign to the fact that I will have a sllllllooooooooow computer?

Here is my situation:
When I right-click on my desktop, it takes a good 4 seconds for the window to pop-up.
My computer takes about 3 minutes to boot up and reach full functionality, etc.
Programs are slow to open.
Let me tell you its FRUSTRATING!

And yes, Ive defraged my hard drive AND used clean disk AND ran scandisk AND ran Ad-Aware AND ran Norton AV AND cleaned up my startup. This aint a software problem folks.

128Meg of ram is not much for XP, 256 would be better.

XP home edition sucks. upgrage to xp pro or downgrane to win2k pro, you'll be allot better off either way.

I agree with Tedob1 about downgrading your OS to W2K, winXP eats your resources!
It is recommended that you have 256 RAM to run winXP efficiently, so you could stick another 128MB in and it should do wonders.

So change OS or buy more RAM!

Cheers

r3b00+

Celerons don't have any problems with any OS, afaik.

And as the others suggested, XP needs a little more.. 128 is the bare minimum, but for a liveable windows eXPerience, you need a hell of a lot (atleast double) more..

So there realy is only 2 options, change to a descent OS (not the telletubbie huggy-feely XP kind) or stick in atleast another 128.. (unless all your banks are full..)

______________
/me loves slack

Getting a seperate video card could also help a lot. Integrated cards dont just take away memory from system ram - the os has to constantly switch memory between the two which takes time and cpu cycles.

Yeah, more RAM, turning off all the cute little bubblegum effects XP has would help to, get rid of all the scrollin and shade effects and stuff, might help a bit.

Well all the suggestions above should help but I have just recently upgraded my wife's pc at work to a AMD Athlone XP 1.7GHZ ,128mb ram shared.It is still running win98 but with the amount of video ram shared which in her case was 32mb.You can change this in the bios to 16, or 8mb.She was only left with 96mb ram overall and I tell you it was also not running up to standard just because of shared ram.I changed it to 8mb, and it was considerable better.

So yes I think definitely more ram should do it , the more the better.Just be carefull to look at the onboard video chipset so that if you decide to get a seperate screencard that it is not the same.Usually they do not work together.

Hope it helps.
regards
vanman:)

im afraid more ram is the only way to make XP perform better, i know this from experience, someone i know put xp pro on his new box (i think amd 800 w/ 128 meg ram) and he was wondering why it ran like a dog, runs fine on my p-3 with 256 ram though...

really any system based around NT is bound to be memory and resource intensive anyway

Hey,

Let's see... with 128 (and sometimes with 256) MB of RAM and an on-board video card you may have a fast computer with XP... yes... but at the begining, i mean when nothing or a few programs are installed in your PC, then when you install programs like Office XP, Norton 2003, heavy new games, etc. in my opinion, and believe me i have proved it installing and re-installing XP again and again... you'll need at least 512 MB of RAM and a separated video card with at least 64 MB.

If you have the money... i think this is your quick solution. If not, back-up your files, reinstall XP to clean your registry and install only the programs you'll really use. Try to never full your registry with usefuls entries.

Good luck.

Something else to try is installing TweakUI, which can let you increase menu speed, and remove programs from the right-click menu. If you have a bunch of programs listed when you right-click the Desktop and choose New -> it can slow things down.
You can get TweakUI here.
It is part of the PowerToys for XP, a free download.
TweakUI has been out for years. It is an unsupported Microsoft tool to tweak Windows interface. It does help.
No, it is not gonna be a replacement for more RAM (an opinion I also agree with), but it won't hurt.

The only other thing I can think of is for you to move your swapfile to its own hard disk, specifically a faster hard disk, something faster than the 5400 rpm standard IDE drive. If you can put in a 2nd hard drive, make it 7200rpm or 10000 rpm, and move the swapfile onto it. That will speed things up until you get more RAM.

Good luck.