Desktop running slow

[mojo42]

Hey,

we have a Gateway 710x that just seems to really lag at points. it's not all the time, but when it happens, it almost stops moving and there is much hard drive activity. I've used CCleaner on it, used Smart Defrag, deleted browsing info and such, and doesn't seem to do much. my system (in signature) seems to run almost x2 as fast as the 710x!! the 710x has only 512 MB memory running XP, i've suggested doubling that or more. will that pretty much solve the problem? cuz, one time when it was lagging, i was (miraculously) able to bring up task manager and i had seen that 1.64 GB was in the paging file!! i supposed that's why it was running slow. so what i really need to know is that, will adding more memory pretty much solve this? thanks.

 

[deanj20]

In short, yes.

It has a 3.2-GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor. It comes stock w/ 1GB 400-MHz DDR SDRAM, so it's odd that you only have 512MB installed.

From what I've found, it looks like it has four sockets. If you've got $200 just lying around, I would put a 1GB stick in every socket. If not, you could buy 3 more 512MB sticks for around $90, giving you a total of 2GB RAM, and that should boost performance significantly.

Check it out: http://www.memorystock.com/ram/Gateway710XPerformanceRAM.html

But in the meantime, you ought to disable whatever processes you don't absolutely need from starting up at boot time. Go to Start-->Run and type in msconfig. In the Startup tab click Disable All. Then, in the Services tab, check hide all Microsoft services and click Disable All. Click OK, reboot the computer and I'll be it runs a lot faster. Remember, if you find out you've disabled something that you need to run at boot time, just open up msconfig again and check the box to re-enable it.

Hope that helps ya out!

 

[mojo42]

oh, well it must not be the "x" model then. cuz it only has the 512 MB and 3.0 GHz processor. oops. but yeah, we're thinking about just adding another GB to it. and i kinda already thought it would need more. so yeah, thanks!