Just an FYI for those that dont want to fully upgrade their computers...
...buy more memory at the very least. People underestimate how much ram is used for the OS and the various things they may have resident. XP does a pretty good job of making sure there is memory for everything the user wants to do within reason, involving lots of virtual mem swapping and such, but less than a gig these days just isn't sufficient. Considering that ram is unbelievably inexpensive, two gigs should be a reasonable thing to upgrade to and you'll see significant performance increase.
Tiny story; bought a new laptop (so I could animate in front of the tv
) about a year and a half ago, and only late last year did its sluggishness become apparent. I was baffled as I KNEW I has 2 gigs of ram. Now I should know better, as I've been building computers now for 12 years, but I just shrugged and assumed it was just the way it was and couldn't be bothered to check or even tweak my machine. One day it becomes unbearable, so I get FreeRamXP to check on my memory status and have it manage it in favor of my apps. Lo and behold, it was registering 1 gig of available RAM! So after calling Dell, New Delhi branch
, it turns out I never ordered 2 gigs, and later recalled that I did that intentionally so I could get aftermarket sticks far cheaper that Dell would ever offer them. So to fast forward, got the extra gig and now it screams. Point is your system can easily be underperforming simply by the ram bottleneck, so check that first, get ram thats compatible with your mobo and I can guarantee you'll see a significant boost.
Cheers
