Re: The Weakest Link

Motherboard Vendor & Model # is important, because from that
you can determine which Chipset is used. Personally, I would say
your IDE/ATAPI system is overloaded. Fully populating all 4 taps
is going to cause a bottleneck.
A 1.5 Gigahertz CPU should handle multitasking - but 512 Megs
of memory is probably on the low-end with your usage.
You should check and see which UDMA mode your IDE drives
are set to. I would also make sure the IDE drives are on the same
channel and the CDs are on the other.
You didn't mention what peripheral cards you have in use, but that
age PC may have marginal ACPI/APIC support. My analysis of
the system is older Chipset and too many IDE devices overloading
the PCI Bus.

"tosime" <tosime@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Omm7PAtxFHA.3892@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> CPU
> 1.50 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
> 8 kilobyte primary memory cache
> 256 kilobyte secondary memory cache
>
> Memory
> 512 Megabytes Installed Memory
>
> Slot 'DIMM_A' has 256 MB
> Slot 'DIMM_B' has 256 MB
> (Max memory 1 gigabyte)
>
> Drives
> 220.06 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
> 181.45 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
>
> HP CD-Writer+ 9900j [CD-ROM drive]
> HP DVD Writer 300n USB Device [CD-ROM drive]
> Lite-On LTN486 48x Max [CD-ROM drive]
> 3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]
>
> OTi Ultra Floppy USB Device [Hard drive] (131 MB) -- drive 2
> ST3200822A [Hard drive] (200.05 GB) -- drive 1, s/n 5LJ1M08A, rev 3.01,
> SMART Status: Healthy
> ST320413A [Hard drive] (20.02 GB) -- drive 0, s/n 6ED3L4E4, rev 3.39,
> SMART Status: Healthy
>
> Video Card
> 16MB ATI Rage 128 Ultra [Display adapter]
> DELL M781s [Monitor] (15.7"vis, s/n 58VYR18UA1UT, August 2001)
>
> What I do
> 1) PowerPoint Slides
> 2) Microsoft Word - text documents
> 3) Internet - lots of downloads
> 4) Graphics - Page layout
> 5) Excel spreadsheets
> 6) Print photographs downloaded from my camera
> 7) Email - Outlook lots of daily email
>
> Better Performance
> Systems slows down when I have lots of apps open at the same time
> Want to be able to switch quickly between applications
> Want to do searches in the background without degrading foregorund
> applications
> System locks up from time to time
>
> Note - all drivers current, Windows downloads current.
>
> I hope this helps...Tony
>
> PS - can you recommend a hardware newsgroup?
>
> "Leythos" <void@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:MPG.1da8c57a55b5168d98a17a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> In article <OUbqsWsxFHA.788@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
>> tosime@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...
>>> My Dell Dimesnion 4300 is about four years old now. I upgrade different
>>> components every 6 months or so. I can't help wondering which is now the
>>> weakest link in my system. Is there a simple way of finding out so that
>>> I
>>> can get the best bang for the buck? Ideally some tool should be able to
>>> look
>>> at my system and say if you did "xyz" you would get the maximum
>>> performance
>>> boost for the type of computing (Microsoft Office) you do.
>>
>> Need to know more - how about:
>>
>> CPU (Intel/AMD, Mhz, Cache size, FSB speed)
>> Memory (number of sticks, Amount, Speed)
>> Drives (type, speed, size)
>> Video Card (Brand, retail/oem, memory, speed if known)
>>
>> What you do with it that you want more/better performance for?
>>
>> --
>>
>> spam999free@xxxxxxxxxx
>> remove 999 in order to email me
>
>


.

Loading