Monday, October 24, 2005 12:16 PM szurgot

New computer woes - Part 2 - Not enough memory

As I said in part 1, bought my son a new computer this weekend. (Last one I'm buying him... He wants to upgrade it, he's on his own... He's 18 now <grin>)

So I uninstalled about 35-40 pieces of software, and the machine still ran slow. So I took a peek at task manager, and it was running at 270MB, but it only had 256MB... So it was swapping like crazy. Now, don't get me wrong, I know I bought an inexpensive computer, but shouldn't they at least come with enough to run the software installed without feeling like molassas... The 1.8 GHz was completed defeated by the swap space. Fortuneately, the memory in his old computer was still good, so got it up to 768 MB, and it was golden.

After that, just had to wait about 2 hours for all the patches and upgrades to install, and it was pretty performant.

Comments

# re: New computer woes - Part 2 - Not enough memory

Monday, October 24, 2005 3:06 PM by Eric Newton

Yeah, thats the first thing I do when a get a new PC: format and reinstall.

Sometimes there's some handy dandy utilities (like a Profile manager for laptops, to determine if Wireless settings should be on/off depending on location, etc)

Most of the time though a new PC is filled with a lot of trialware crap (Norton AntiVirus with a 3month subscription...?!) I believe thats the reason MS is just pulling AntiVirus and AntiSpyware into the OS, because the companies involved have been too complacent to try to lure people in, without explaining the neccesity for every PC to have AntiVirus/AntiSpyware. (In football this is the Prevent Defense)

# re: New computer woes - Part 2 - Not enough memory

Monday, October 24, 2005 5:56 PM by Gabriel Halsmer

Yep. I second that approach. Don't trust the uninstalls. I think many programs leave crap behind that clogs the system. To get the best performance out of your machine, reinstall the OS (no need to re-format harddrive though, or at least I never do).