Old computers basically unusable with modern software?

J

jimmytwohand

New Member
Hello all. Sorry if wrong category, bit of everything chucked in.
I have an old desktop P4 2.93ghz, 512mb RAM, 128mb gfx card, windows XP Pro. I've been doing as much reading as i can since i tried to get it back up and running and found it is barely capable of using the internet.

It is, i grant you, old. However it was a high spec machine at the time with absolutely no problems surfing the internet, online videos, file management, photo editing etc. Ive tried to eliminate as many other variables as possible by doing a virus/malware scan, fresh install, updating drivers etc as recommended in so many threads. It seems pretty obvious though that the most basic software has ballooned in requirements so much it is just incapable of running current AV, flash and browsers.

AV - MSE seems to be the lowest resource AV and that locks the computer up for minutes at a time when it tries to do anything, opening a folder, same deal as it scans the lot.
Flash - either constantly crashes, is a slideshow at anything other than small screen 240p, or locks the computer up for a minute while it thinks.
Browsers - are all about the same resource wise and all very slow, dial up was quicker.

The answer would seem to be more RAM. However, i live in one of the wealthiest countries on the planet and earn an alright wage, yet this is a borderline proposition for me. How the heck does the 99% of the world without a whizzbang pc watch gangnam style?

My questions are:
1. I can browse the internet on a kindle yet no-one makes a browser for a pc that has less than a gb of RAM?
2. AV. I can understand that as new, more and varying threats appear more work needs to be done. But no-one is developing for lower end machines which must make up huge market share?
3. Flash - Seems just unbelievable. It takes as much resources to block it as it does to show it. It takes a MASSIVE amount of resources to show it. It is EVERYWHERE. It seems hugely unstable. How is it the only option?
4. When did XP start needing 1gb of RAM? I seem to remember the PC being nearly top-spec at time of purchase yet it only came with half the RAM the OS needed.
5. Are these memory requirements incremental? 2.5gb RAM needed to watch youtube? seriously? Im not going to be able to watch youtube on my i7, 8gb within 6 months. I must be missing something.... but not sure what :)
 
512mb is really not enough ram for XP. 1 to 2 gb is really needed to run XP efficiently. Most likely if you have done a fresh install of windows and still having issues then most likely you have a hardware issue. Either memory, motherboard or something else. Maybe you have installed the wrong drivers?
 
512M should be enough RAM to surf the net and other low resource activities although it isn't going to be able to run many concurrent applications.

I have VMs (Virtual Machines) with 512M of RAM running XP Pro and they work fine. You must have some other problem.

You may not be able to run the current games on that system, but it should do fine for many day-to-day tasks.
 
EDit: In response to JohnB. /EDIT.Thanks for the quick reply. Could well have installed the wrong drivers but i think like you its the lack of memory, that seems clear from the specs stated on the browser, AV software etc and the gig needed for XP. Even upgrading that as much as possible though, flash will still eat the cpu on every website with video, or graphics or adverts (basically all). :)

I was hoping there might be a software solution, as i cant believe the 1 billion computers in use worldwide are all modern machines. Do companies just not want to advertise to places like the Indian market where "buy some more RAM" isn't really an option for most people? I was thinking there must be a lightweight (VLC type) browser or AV somewhere. There's probably a quarter of a billion people at least with a similar problem who could be exclusively advertised to. Do they not drink Coke in Africa?

Edit: Reply to strollin. Thanks for getting back to me. Wierdly its not the games which seem to be a problem, i tried a couple and they run beautifully, still seems to punch above its weight in that regard. Try to open chrome or opera or firefox or IE or go anywhere near a flash video and i get my book out to read a few pages. Same as when MSE decides it wants to update. Complete lock until its finished doing what its doing. I really think the browser software and AV and flash is jut so crammed full of (to me) useless resource hogging rubbish that it becomes unuseable.
 
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Personnaly, I think 512 MB is plenty, unless you are using AV, which I didn't back when I had my D610. If you can use sense and not visit malicious sites and run a malware bytes can every once in a while, you are fine without AV. Your specs are actually similar to mine, with a better CPU. I would use Xubuntu or Lubuntu if you don't need XP, as almost no malicious sites target Linux, and they work great on old systems.
 
Thanks PCunicorn. I think that might be the route to go! Now i think of it i do not see anything i would need XP for and would in fact relish the opportunity to burn it to the ground and purge it from my life forever. I hadn't even caught a whiff of Ubuntu and those two lightweight options look cracking.

Nor had I considered running without AV but that seems a real possibility with the new OS. It shouldn't be going anywhere fishy or handling credit card details etc, i just hoped to resurrect it to an auxiliary web browser and low res media centre/ youtuber.

Thanks again. Ill have a good look through their sites, but this seems to be what i was missing. :)
 
If you just reinstalled the OS on this computer and it's sluggish right off the bat, the drivers for the video card need to be installed. I've noticed this when reinstalling that my display was very sluggish and any videos had a lot of stuttering in them. Then I would install my graphics drivers and directx and everything would smooth out.
 
I would agree with upgrading the memory, 512mb is the minimum of 32 bit xp but that does not mean it is a good idea, I would never run any machine with less than 1gb.

I have refurbished loads of old pentium 4 machines and with a decent amount of memory they are very usable.

What motherboard do you have ? A lot of old pentium 4 machines have sata on the motherboard but are run with old ide type hard drives.
 
jimmytwohand said:
Thanks PCunicorn. I think that might be the route to go! Now i think of it i do not see anything i would need XP for and would in fact relish the opportunity to burn it to the ground and purge it from my life forever. I hadn't even caught a whiff of Ubuntu and those two lightweight options look cracking.

Nor had I considered running without AV but that seems a real possibility with the new OS. It shouldn't be going anywhere fishy or handling credit card details etc, i just hoped to resurrect it to an auxiliary web browser and low res media centre/ youtuber.

Thanks again. Ill have a good look through their sites, but this seems to be what i was missing. :)
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Nice, I use Xubuntu myself. However, it's not very fast on my PC, though I think that has to do with my CPU, which you have a better one. I would try a live CD of both Lubuntu and Xubuntu, and see which one runs better. I like the look of Xubuntu better (it uses XFCE), though it runs slower. Lubuntu (which uses LXDE) is uglier IMO but WILL run faster, how much? IDK, you have to see for yourself. Plain ol' Ubuntu will run very slow, and needs at least 1 GB of RAM, so that's not an option.
 
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What motherboard do you have ? A lot of old pentium 4 machines have sata on the motherboard but are run with old ide type hard drives.
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Its the HP media Center PN120AA-ABU M1150.uk using what i believe is the PTGD1-LA (Puffer) motherboard. Im taking that from the HP website as dxdiag/sysinfo doesnt list it. Two serial ATA (SATA) connectors, each supporting two ports with Hot swap function. Sounds racy. Seems to have a 160gb SATA hard drive. What i didnt realise is it can take 4gb of RAM, i though it was capped at 2.

Full specs here.


Nice, I use Xubuntu myself. However, it's not very fast on my PC, though I think that has to do with my CPU, which you have a better one. I would try a live CD of both Lubuntu and Xubuntu, and see which one runs better. I like the look of Xubuntu better (it uses XFCE), though it runs slower. Lubuntu (which uses LXDE) is uglier IMO but WILL run faster, how much? IDK, you have to see for yourself. Plain ol' Ubuntu will run very slow, and needs at least 1 GB of RAM, so that's not an option.
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Ubuntu does look good, ill keep an eye on it for the future. As the 2 little uns are free i think i might give them both a go and see which i prefer. Lubuntu looks like it might be a winner as i don't really care if its ugly.
 
I'd have to agree with what was said at the beginning of the thread, it is most likely a hardware issue.

As far as I can remember a few of my family members ran xp with 512mb of ram, and performance for day to day tasks wasn't nearly as sluggish as you describe.
With a clean install and not to many applications running in the background 512mb is enough for xp.

A computer belonging to a relative seems to be having a similar issue and i believe it is writing everything to the paging file/hard drive.

I forget exactly what the task manager and or resource monitor in xp shows, but you should be able to get an idea of physical vs virtual memory usage from the task manager.

Also as already mentioned, the proper relatively up to date video card driver should be installed, if it isn't already. The graphics card should be taking over a lot of the work when viewing flash based content or videos, without the proper driver that might not be happening.

Assuming your running 32bit windows xp, I believe this is the correct driver:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownlo...px?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.13&lang=English

Edit: Though the information on the page indicates that you might need to use the 9.3 driver.
 
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jimmytwohand said:
its the hp media center pn120aa-abu m1150.uk using what i believe is the ptgd1-la (puffer) motherboard. Im taking that from the hp website as dxdiag/sysinfo doesnt list it. Two serial ata (sata) connectors, each supporting two ports with hot swap function. Sounds racy. seems to have a 160gb sata hard drive. What i didnt realise is it can take 4gb of ram, i though it was capped at 2.

full specs here.




Ubuntu does look good, ill keep an eye on it for the future. As the 2 little uns are free i think i might give them both a go and see which i prefer. Lubuntu looks like it might be a winner as i don't really care if its ugly.
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rofl
 
Also as already mentioned, the proper relatively up to date video card driver should be installed, if it isn't already. The graphics card should be taking over a lot of the work when viewing flash based content or videos, without the proper driver that might not be happening.
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Sorry, Hawkeye, i missed your post first time around on the driver issue. I double checked your link when i updated the driver and read it as i needed the 9.3 legacy which is what i'm currently running. It was an old copy from disk (seem to have had a couple of x300 cards) but from what i could see that driver hasnt changed in years. Maybe i should be on the 10.2?

As far as I can remember a few of my family members ran xp with 512mb of ram, and performance for day to day tasks wasn't nearly as sluggish as you describe.
With a clean install and not to many applications running in the background 512mb is enough for xp.
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Maybe i'm expecting too much, or my recollection of its performance was off but 26 seconds to load chrome seems a bit long. Once loaded (just the one tab on the google landing page) task manager shows available physical memory of 10212 from 523568. Using 565mb PageFile. It takes in the region of 7-10 seconds to do a simple task like open date and time properties while the browser is open. I think this is unreasonable. Im not trying to edit 3d models while watching a blu ray.

If i go to youtube (only, still one tab) it takes PF up to 831mb. Video is playable at 360p while embedded using 60-90%CPU. Full screen the video stutters and uses 100% CPU and rapidly heats up, the fans kick in within a few minutes. Youtube is for all intents and purposes unusable. If i try to open another tab while the youtube video is paused it while take 7-8 seconds to achieve it. The computer forum website only has one small flash ad but it seems to use around 25% CPU to service it. Trying to run a music video on minimum res while browsing computer forum with the ad running in another tab is painful. Its like the delay from a satelite broadcast between input and action.

I think there are 2 issues:
1. Flash says: EVERYTHING BE MINES!
Adobe say they are aware a small number of people are experiencing very high resource usage by flash but they cannot replicate it and its not affecting that many people so its not a development priority. Apparently flash is also, to all intents and purposes, everywhere and in everything on the internet and there isnt an alternative. :good:
2. The browser is running the memory dry and everything is being loaded in and out of the virtual memory all of which is being closely inspected by Microsoft security essentials using even more memory.

It should be noted that without a browser, unplugged from the internet with MSE killed everything is most satisfactory. Likewise video, even near HD quality stuff and dvds are ok if VLC is used. Thanks for trying to help people but i still suspect browser wars and AV wars and new generations of flash mean basic system requirements from a few unavoidable programs are now just too high for it to handle except in isolation.
 
OK, I may have missed it in previous posts, but what video card is in your system. Is it onboard...meaning built into the motherboard, or is is a PCI-e card? If it's onboard, what motherboard do you have? If it is an PCI-e card, which brand is it? AMD/ATI or an Nvidia Geforce?
 
I just did some experimenting with a VM running Win XP Pro with 512M RAM. Chrome loads in 5 seconds, running a full screen YouTube video, CPU averaged about 60%, RAM hovered at around 430M. Using FireFox watching the same YouTube video, CPU averaged 30%, RAM hovered at 350M. No stuttering of the video with either.

When I first fired the VM up, it was pretty sluggish but it was updating VMWare Tools and MSE while I was downloading Chrome. Once those were done, the system was very usable.

You could go with Ubuntu or you could try reinstalling XP. There is definitely something amiss as your system shouldn't be as slow as you're seeing.
 
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GFX card: ATI Radeon X300se (128MB DDR) using PCI-Express interface ( I seem to remember this was a very overclockable card, but not sure i really want to go that route.)
Motherboard: PTGD1-LA (HP name: Puffer-UL8E)

In case i do go the upgrade route, any recommended brands for RAM? Prices all seem to be about equal. (2 x 512mb or 2x256) ,184 pin, DDR SDRAM, PC3200 MB/sec
 
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strollin said:
I just did some experimenting with a VM running Win XP Pro with 512M RAM. Chrome loads in 5 seconds, running a full screen YouTube video, CPU averaged about 60%, RAM hovered at around 430M. Using FireFox watching the same YouTube video, CPU averaged 30%, RAM hovered at 350M. No stuttering of the video with either.

When I first fired the VM up, it was pretty sluggish but it was updating VMWare Tools and MSE while I was downloading Chrome. Once those were done, the system was very usable.

You could go with Ubuntu or you could try reinstalling XP. There is definitely something amiss as your system shouldn't be as slow as you're seeing.
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Hmmm thats interesting. Thanks a bunch for double checking that, it gives me hope that there is still life in the old girl. After reinstalling XP i killed all the graphical enhancements, indexing service, non-ms startups etc and updated all the drivers i could. I've tried near every combo of avast/ZA/MSE with opera, firefox, chrome and IE, chrome/MSE seemed to fare best in my (massively unscientific) tests but that might stand reexamining on the fresh install. Something is not happy somewhere and i think it might well be less aggro to go lubuntu than track it down. Famous last words. :)
 
Always if you're having problems with your graphics being sluggish or jittery you start looking for updated drivers to see if there are any; so I say go ahead and try installing the 10.2 drivers for your card and see if that makes a difference. It's not gonna hurt it to try.
 
jimmytwohand said:
GFX card: ATI Radeon X300se (128MB DDR) using PCI-Express interface ( I seem to remember this was a very overclockable card, but not sure i really want to go that route.)
Motherboard: PTGD1-LA (HP name: Puffer-UL8E)

In case i do go the upgrade route, any recommended brands for RAM? Prices all seem to be about equal. (2 x 512mb or 2x256) ,184 pin, DDR SDRAM, PC3200 MB/sec
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Similar specs to mine. The GPU is fine for pretty much any OS upto Windows 7.
 
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