RAM

Puttin...See the programs you've got on the bottom right of your screen? If there are some BS ones. Turn them off. Right click on the icon and close. Then check your memory...Bear is right. You just reclaimed harddisk space.

If that helps. Find your menu that allows you to enable and disable programs during startup. I can't remember where it is...but it should help.

 

Another to try is hit control- alt- del at the same time and see what all programs you have running. Alot of programs automatically start up every time you turn your pc on. You probably don't need them running. You can fix this by clicking on start- run and type "msconfig" in the run menu. Then click on the "startup" tab and you can then uncheck which programs you want to start on when you start your pc. I think you can pretty much uncheck everything but "systray" and any antivirus programs you may have and still run your pc effectively. If you do this and something does go wrong you can just go back to "msconfig" and recheck everything and then check each one off one by one until you get your pc like you like it. (actually you should probably uncheck each one by one anyway) I read where your pc system resource should run at at least 70%. You can check this by right clicking on "my computer" from your desktop. CLick on the performance tab and you will see "system resources"

 

Bear- HP6730.

 

Guess thats what I was doing. I don't have anything loading on start up but ZoneAlarm. But for some reason, I was able to get back on the other board and post again. May have been a coincidence.
So, I can put my Video editing programs back in and it won't matter?

 

cleaning up your hard drive will make a difference with video/photo editing programs as they like to stay in constant contact with the hard drive to temporarily store those large files.

the more space there is on your drive, the easier it is for them to find a free area big enough to plop something down at.

the more memory you have, the faster they can do it.

 

Thanks for the info Bear, I will check out those sites.

 

also go to start : run : msconfig : startup : and uncheck some of the things you dont want to run automatically. Your computer will start much faster and run more efficient. Also you can add an extra fan to keep running cool.

Installing ram is very easy and you wont blow anything up as long as you unplug your comp. I always push the on button after i unplug mine .
Make sure your static free....

 

I got one 256ram deal for around $30 bucks from Crucial.com. If your not sure what type of ram to buy, they have a huge drop down menu of pc mfgs and model numbers. I'm now up to 384 meg or ram on a PIII 650mhz. All that ram appears to have my PC running about as fast as my neighbors P4 with 128.

 

Also, if you run a scandisk, and then a defrag, the drive won't have to bounce all over the disk when pulling up or saving a file. It can deal with contiguous blocks. I've been waiting to use 'contiguous' in a sentence.

 

huh huh...Ram.