Increasing performance on a system

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sabo, Eric
  • Start date Start date
S

Sabo, Eric

Does anyone have any suggestions to how I can increase system performance on
an Pentium III 450 MHz with 128 Megs of ram running Windows XP SP1. I have
most of the Memory Management tweaks done on this PC. Is there any thing
else I can do to increase appplication speed, most used applications are
Word, Outlook, Excel, Internet Explorer and a little bit of Excel?
 
You need at least 256MB of RAM for adequate performance with XP, and 512MB
is much better. If your system is old enough to have shipped with a P3 450
MHz, hardware is probably the biggest bottleneck.

Tom Swift
 
I agree, 128MB is far too little to run those applications and the memory
clock speed is slow aswell (100MHz)

The ide disk controllers are probably only ATA33 or ATA66 at most. So you
are loosing out on cpu, memory and disk accessing.

Is this a home or business environment?

You could possibly squeeze another 33% out of the hardware. The 450 did
overclock quite well, but I wouldn't recommend overclocking in a business
environment. The 450 has an FSB of 100Mhz and so normally uses PC100 memory,
if you were to add more, then try and get it second hand off an auction
site, otherwise you'll be paying over the odds for old technology. If you
did overclock, you'd probably need PC133 memory anyway, as by setting the
FSB to 133MHz, the P450 turns into a P600. There are other factors to take
into account, such as the speed of pci devices and video card, and disk
controllers which may not like being run at higher speeds. I still have a
p450 system overclocked to make it a P600 running windows 2000 professional
and its very stable.

Do you happen to know what kind of motherboard you have, or was this an off
the shelf system ? Do you know if it at least has an Intel BX chipset, which
although was a 66/100 MHz chipset unofficially supported 133Mhz?

You've got to really want to do this of course, it can be very time
consuming trying to squeeze the last drop of performance out of a system,
while keeping the system stable. There's no point overclocking if your
system crashes every 10 minutes. Also overclocking will produce more heat,
so you may need to upgrade the cooling,

If you have the money, it would be a lot easier to go for a new system, or a
second hand one from an auction site. If you do want to try overclocking it,
post the hardware configuration including manufacturers and model numbers if
you have them.

Paul



the Pentium III 450 did overclock quite well, you could probably squeeze
600Mhz out of it
 
This is at a place of business, we cannot afford to place an additional 128
MEG of ram into these systems. I was looking for some system registry
entries that might help in the performance of these systems.

Yes, the IDE disk controllers are running at ATA66.

I am looking for a no cost solution. Anything would be appreciated?
 
Unfortunately, the laws of physics being what they are, you cannot make your
computer run faster than its hardware will allow. There are no "system
registry entries" that can help you.

Tom Swift
 
We are using Office XP professional currently.



Paul B T Hodges said:
What version of the MS Office Products are you using ? Is it Office 2003,
Office XP, Office 2000, Office 97 or some other ?

Paul



have system,
Click to expand...
 
Sorry Eric, I don't get it. You can afford to buy windows xp and office xp,
but can't afford any more memory ?
The minimum requirement of windows xp/office xp is 128MB plus 8MB for each
office program, so as soon as you open one office program, you are under the
minimum memory required.

What memory tweaks have you done?
Have you disabled all unrequired services?

Paul
 
Back
Top