A lot of people out there ask me about upgrading; because their PC's slowly getting slower compared to the orrigional PC's speed when they 1st got it.
so I have put together a little bit of info for you all..
Upgrading your processor or memory or both are the most common upgrades to increase performance, that is as long as your motherboard supports an upgrade. In most cases, adding memory will make more difference than getting a new processor - unless you're running a lot of processor-intensive applications (i.e. heavy number crunching etc). If you have a computer that came with the minimal RAM requirement for XP (128MB), you'll get a significant performance boost from adding more. It is important that if you do add more memory then you must not mix EDO and NON EDO memeory.
regarding software programs that promise to "optimize" the memory you already have? That might seem to be an attractive solution if you shudder at the thought of opening the box. But it is a real case of buyer beware! new applications are coming out all the time, and i have tested a few with disapointing results, I cannot specifically identify any 1 optimising package for memory. Before you invest in one, you might want to check out Mark Russinovich's article over at Windows & .NET Magazine:
http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=040713ED-Russinovich
There are some applications out there that will 'clean' your pc up (under the 'optimization' banner) rather than specifically optimize memory in the PC's box. I have used various ones and one of my favorites for 'newbies' is Ashampoo Windows Optimizer Platinum Suite. Very user friendly, free for 30 days and then a purchase. this package will only clean out 'safe' items from your PC, the good thing about it is if you are not familiar with PC file navigation then it will do the work for you.
There are ways you can increase performance without upgrading your hardware, though. One of the easiest ways is to defragment your hard disk. A fragmented disk will eventually slow you down to a crawl. You can use the built in XP defragmenter, or a more sophisticated third party program program such as O&O.
Another effective way to increase performance is to turn off services that you don't need. If you have a low-end machine, disabling fancy effects like menu animations and using a plain background instead of wallpaper can speed up your computer. Other things that can slow your machine down are 'resident' packages running in the background all the time, lots of applications nowadays install services or processes or insert startup routeens in your machine and they all need system processing power to run, making your processor run slower.
Overall performance depends on many different hardware and software components. One slow component can act as a bottleneck in an otherwise fast system, slowing the whole thing down. Here's a list of performance tweaking tips that will get you started:
http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=040713ED-Tweaking
If all else fails, the old "reformat the hard disk and start over" trick usually works - at least, until you load up on the programs, frag the disk, and get everything bogged down again. Remember, though, that some performance issues - such as how fast your Web pages load - may have more to do with the speed of your Internet connection than your computer itself. Also be aware that the default settings for a new XP pc's Max MTU values etc is set to a 56k modem, as not everyone has internet speeds higher than that, this can be changed by automatically by running any good IP Optimizer appliciation.
I hope that this is usefull..
kind regards
mikeyb
