Just a few weeks ago, the 3 sticks were $25 apiece. I think they are back up to about $35 each.

Laptop is 450 mhz processor with 192 meg ram.

If this has been a gradual slow down, insufficient RAM may not be the problem. You may want to defrag your hard drive, and/or clean off your temp internet files. Sort of an electronic tune-up. There is also something called "history" which keeps track of where you have been on the web. This can be set to only one day. The point here is this-- Who cares where you visited two or three weeks ago? It is just useless information taking up space and resources.

If you still find you need more RAM, be sure that what you add is compatible with what is already on board. Not all RAM is created equal. Mixing brands is almost guaranteed to give problems. Also, there are various types of RAM to be had-- SDRAM, RDRAM, something called double-data RAM, and so on.

My own 'puter is aP2 450 MHz with 192 RAM, and by doing the tune up thing often, it still scoots along as well as it did when I first got it a couple of years ago.

This is an area that I wouldn't touch myself, because I don't know what I am doing inside a 'puter tower. Best left to a 'puter guru.

Hope this is some help.

[ January 09, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Preston ]

I have 512 mb of ram on both my Pentium 3 933mhz (Dell) and my AMD 1.2 ghz (built that one myself)

If you are running Adobe Illustrator you definately want as much ram as you can get - it's a notorious resource hawg. Photoshop requires a substantial amount too, expecially when you start using filter plugins, etc.

Glenn hit the nail on the head...they're almost giving ram away now....load it up...you'll never regret it. 128mb is not that much these days.

As I understand it, sometimes an installed program will get "memory leaks" somehow and drain your resources more quickly than it should. If you find this happens with a particular program, it might be adviseable to uninstall that program and then reinstall it.

Also...as I understand it.....Windows XP and Windows 2000 don't have the resource limitations that Win95 has. Supposedly, you won't drain your resources with those OS's.

I have 512K on my PC for running OMEGA and Edge; 192K on one MAC, 80K on the other MAC.

Glenn is right about the matchmaking part of it. And if your computer is using old style RAM, the prices may not be as good as today's style RAM.

I use Photoshop a lot and it likes RAM

I just got a new machine las week. 1.8 gig processor and 768 DDRAM. This puppy howls!

Which version of Windows are you using and how long has it been since the hard drive was last reformatted and the system rebuilt?

It could just be Windows loading up and needing a fresh start - you'd be surprised what a difference wiping the entire system clean, reformatting the drive, and rebuilding it can make. This is my first suspiscion.

Do you have Norton software running in the background? If so, kill it. All those little Norton monitors, warning and prompts suck up system resources. Norton used to be good back when DOS was the big thing but since Win95 came out, it's been junk. Besides that, Microsoft ripped off Norton Utilities and included it with their OS so you already have the disk utilities on your machine.

What other software do you have running in the background? You might have programs running and not even know about it.
Click on "Start" -> "Run" then type in 'msconfig' and click OK. Go to the "startup" tab and everything in that list is currently running on your computer. Some of the items in the list might be unidentifiable to you, but the ones you might recognize and know you dont need running can be unchecked.

Otherwise, a RAM upgrade never hurts. I have 256MB in my Dell laptop and am considering goin the full 512 MB while RAM is cheap. I havent had any problems with the laptop slowing down at all, in fact I've tried and tried to crash it, opening all my graphics software at once, opening 200MB Raster Images in Photoshop, even printing (which can bring any windows system to its knees) with no avail.. the sucker wont go down! but may as well do it while the memory is cheap and still available for my particular laptop.

[ January 09, 2002: Message edited by: old paint ]

[ January 09, 2002: Message edited by: old paint ]

Just to add to the confusion-- I would argue a bit with Mike P, on the Norton issue. I have the utilities version, and it runs all the time, with all those indicators showing on the desktop. Trust me, they are handy to have as far as keeping track of everything from internet connection speed, to virtual memory availability, usable or empty hard drive space, disk errors, percentage of file fragmentation, etc. The file fragmentation indicator is especially useful, in that you know right now if excessive fragmentation has occured, and you can fix it before things get out of hand. The point there is with a lot of fragging, your system is wasting time chasing file fragments all over your hard drive.

I haven't noticed any system slowing even with Norton always on, and I wouldn't do without it.

Reformatting your hard drive is something I don't know beans about, so no help there.

You also didn't say which version of windows you are running-- Win XP it is said requires at least 128 Mb of Ram to run at all. The other versions I guess require less, but, they still take quite a lot.

Going back to the electronic tune-up, I think you will find your system will show noticeable performance improvement if you do this on a regular basis. Spell that as "often" say once a week.

I bought another 256 and didn't notice much of a difference unless rendering things with Eye Candy or something like that.

I also used to have Norton Utilities running all of the junk. I since only use the email scanning because it really does hog the machine.

I also run Win 98, first edition, but with a lot of patches, updates, etc. downloaded from Microsoft's website. So far, it has been pretty stable.

If you let Norton run, it can be set to do what amounts to system maintenance on whatever schedule you want. You can also close out your programs until all you have showing is whatever is on your desktop. Then go to start, programs, accessories, system tools. At that point, you can do a Maintenance Wizard dealie which does several different items. Scandisk, disk cleanup, defrag, and supposedly "speeds up your most frequently used programs." Or, you can opt to do the same items one at a time. This is built into Windows.

I think the Norton version does a better job of keeping the system running smoothly than Windows. I have had a lot less of the "blue screens of death" since I started using the Norton setup. Have also had the start and start over bit with Win doing the defrag. See if the Norton doesn't do it better.

I like my norton Utilities with win 98,, anytime it starts to burp, i run the utilites. manually like win doctor and system check...

my computer doesn't "scream", it whines a lot though.

it works well for my uses.

I don't remember how to check % of fragmentation in Win 98, and I should. But, if you let Norton Utilities show on your desktop, one of the indicators shows the % of non-fragmented HD.You can also select which indicators will show, and which will not.

Several of the indicators look like a stoplight, green is healthy, yellow caution, red there is a problem. Some of the others look like a speedometer i.e. internet connection speed, disk throughput, and so on.

Thanks Bill, I might need to get that Norton program.
Thanks everyone.

[ January 11, 2002: Message edited by: Wayne Webb ]