Understanding AMD K-6

[:-\)]

Hi All,

My 5 year old PC has an AMD K-6. The data from System Info follows my
inquiry.

I've had friends tell me that the AMD K-6 is too slow, I need to upgrade or
replace.

In current advertising I see computers equipped with AMD and some with the
Intel P III. What is the difference, what is AMD? I wasn't really educated
when I bought this machine.

My problem is that everything seems to run slow. I've checked the machine
thouroughly for bugs, worms, etc and I'm clean.

Sometimes when launching programs, the screen goes blank white with a shade
of grey, finally it comes back to normal.

Sometimes the machine is slow in responding to ALT + TAB when changing
programs.

A lot of times the print doesn't appear on the screen as fast as I'm typing,
and believe me I am no speed demon at typing.

What can I do to check this machine, or what other info do I need to supply
to have my question answered?

Thank You

Here are some of the specs from this machine:

[System Information]

Microsoft Windows 98 4.10.2222 A
Upgrade using Full CD /SrcDir=E:\WIN98 /IQ /U:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
IE 5 6.0.2800.1106
Uptime: 0:02:17:41
Normal mode
On "OEMCOMPUTER" as "Default"
Systemax
AuthenticAMD AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
320MB RAM
58% system resources free
Windows-managed swap file on drive C (7187MB free)
Available space on drive C: 7183MB of 12397MB (FAT32)


[Hardware Resources]

[Conflicts/Sharing]

IRQ 4 Communications Port (COM3)
IRQ 4 Communications Port (COM1)
IRQ 5 U.S. Robotics 56K Voice Win
IRQ 5 IRQ Holder for PCI Steering
IRQ 10 Creative Labs Sound Blaster PCI128
IRQ 10 RAGE IIC AGP (English)
IRQ 10 IRQ Holder for PCI Steering
IRQ 11 ALi PCI to USB Open Host Controller
IRQ 11 IRQ Holder for PCI Steering
IRQ 14 Primary IDE controller (dual fifo)
IRQ 14 ALi M5229 PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
IRQ 15 Secondary IDE controller (dual fifo)
IRQ 15 ALi M5229 PCI Bus Master IDE Controller


[DMA]

1 Sound Blaster PCI128 Legacy Device
2 Standard Floppy Disk Controller
4 Direct memory access controller
0 (free)
3 (free)
5 (free)
6 (free)
7 (free)

 

[Grunff]

My 5 year old PC has an AMD K-6. The data from System Info follows my
inquiry.

I've had friends tell me that the AMD K-6 is too slow, I need to upgrade or
replace.

That's always relative.

In current advertising I see computers equipped with AMD and some with the
Intel P III. What is the difference, what is AMD? I wasn't really educated
when I bought this machine.

AMD is a company. They make CPUs, including the K6. Their current
product range includes the Athlon, Opteron and Duron.

Intel is also a company who make CPUs. Their current product range
includes the P(entium)4 and the Celeron.

My problem is that everything seems to run slow. I've checked the machine
thouroughly for bugs, worms, etc and I'm clean.

A K6 is quite an old machine - having said that, my development server
is a 6 year old K6II 500 which is still running very happily, and will
probably retire in 3-4 years. The bottom line is it really depends what
software you want to run.

By your description, it sounds like your run pretty normal home/office
type stuff on Win98. You have a reasonable amount of RAM. You could
probably improve the speed of your machine by doing a clean reinstall of
your operating system. Or you could get yourself a new machine.

 

[Chris Stolworthy]

The K-6 processors are quite old, in the electronics realm anyway. A new
machine would have a faster processor, faster bootup, faster at opening
programs, and be able to run the newest software out there. Since you
didn't include your processor speed, i will assume that it is a 500 (Just to
make things easier). Anyways you can get a pretty respectable machine for
around $400 US. A Athlon 1.67 GHz machine with 256 Ram, and a 40gig Hard
drive. This machine would be more than enough for what it sound like u use
your computer for, very basic word processing, E-mail. Internet? I
personally think it is worth the upgrade, but that is all relative.

 

[:-\)]

Thank You both for your responses.

1) You asked about speed, I do not know nor do I know how to obtain that
information.

2) Correct assumption about usage, Internet, email and letter writing (MS
Word)

3) This machine never used to be this slow, so I started thinking something
is either failing or maybe there is a program or 2 that is bogging down the
machine and I'm too dumb too realize it or what to look for.

4) I am running on dial up Internet service, so I do expect that to be
slow, but not plain old typing.

5) I did perform a reinstall of Win 98 a couple of weeks ago, with no
improvement on performance.

6) Perhaps I'll consider a format c: before I go shopping.

Have A Great Weekend

 

[Grunff]

1) You asked about speed, I do not know nor do I know how to obtain that
information.

When the machine first boots up, the first black screen will tell you
the speed - somethink like 500MHz or similar.

5) I did perform a reinstall of Win 98 a couple of weeks ago, with no
improvement on performance.

Odd. So you didn't format the drive when you reinstalled?

 

[Trent©]

I've had friends tell me that the AMD K-6 is too slow, I need to upgrade or
replace.

Too slow for what? lol Only you can decide that. Was the machine
running well enough for you at one point?

In current advertising I see computers equipped with AMD and some with the
Intel P III. What is the difference, what is AMD? I wasn't really educated
when I bought this machine.

AMD and Intel are the manufacturers of CPU's...the guts of what runs
your computer.

My problem is that everything seems to run slow. I've checked the machine
thouroughly for bugs, worms, etc and I'm clean.

Get someone to tweak up your BIOS. Turn on shadow BIOS ROM...and any
other caching available in there. There's many other things that can
be tweaked there also.

Sometimes when launching programs, the screen goes blank white with a shade
of grey, finally it comes back to normal.

Much depends on the program.

Sometimes the machine is slow in responding to ALT + TAB when changing
programs.

Make sure you do a weekly defrag...and scandisk. Also, install and
run a good anti-virus program (NOT Norton!)...and Ad-Aware.

A lot of times the print doesn't appear on the screen as fast as I'm typing,
and believe me I am no speed demon at typing.

Run msconfig...and see what programs are running in the background.
One of those could be stealing CPU cycles...which would cause problems
on that CPU.

Also, if you don't have an autoexe.bat, create one. Then put in this
line...

mode con rate=32 delay=1

That'll make the typing go faster.

How many drives and/or partitions do you have? Your cd-rom seems to
have an E designation.

Also, if you reinstalled Windows, you may need to reinstall all your
chipset drivers.

Good luck.


Have a nice week...

Trent

Follow Joan Rivers' example --- get pre-embalmed!

 

[Chris Stolworthy]

Ok I would think mebbe about low-leveling the drive. If not do a fdisk
/mbr. Then you need to reboot and do a fdisk. Create an primary active
partition. Or if you can just boot off the cd and it will create partition
for you. Then format and reinstall. If that doesn't solve the problem you
might want to check for heat issues. You can do this by opening the pc and
directing a fan into the insides. If it turns out to be a heat problem you
need to take heatsinks off reapply thermal grease etc. But it is quite
possibly failing hardware. Hope this helps

-Chris

 

[philo]

Hi All,

My 5 year old PC has an AMD K-6. The data from System Info follows my
inquiry.

I've had friends tell me that the AMD K-6 is too slow, I need to upgrade or
replace.

In current advertising I see computers equipped with AMD and some with the
Intel P III. What is the difference, what is AMD? I wasn't really educated
when I bought this machine.

My problem is that everything seems to run slow. I've checked the machine
thouroughly for bugs, worms, etc and I'm clean.

Sometimes when launching programs, the screen goes blank white with a shade
of grey, finally it comes back to normal.

Sometimes the machine is slow in responding to ALT + TAB when changing
programs.

A lot of times the print doesn't appear on the screen as fast as I'm typing,
and believe me I am no speed demon at typing.

What can I do to check this machine, or what other info do I need to supply
to have my question answered?

Thank You

Here are some of the specs from this machine:

[System Information]

Microsoft Windows 98 4.10.2222 A
Upgrade using Full CD /SrcDir=E:\WIN98 /IQ /U:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
IE 5 6.0.2800.1106
Uptime: 0:02:17:41
Normal mode
On "OEMCOMPUTER" as "Default"
Systemax
AuthenticAMD AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
320MB RAM
58% system resources free
Windows-managed swap file on drive C (7187MB free)
Available space on drive C: 7183MB of 12397MB (FAT32)

Your machine should actually run win98 quite well

I think all you may need to do is run msconfig and take most of the
junk out of startup
then defrag the drive

assuming it's an AMD-450... with 320 megs of ram it should run great

however if that odd number 320 was a typo and you just have *32* megs of
ram...you should increase it...

 

[Guest]

I've had friends tell me that the AMD K-6 is too slow,
I need to upgrade or replace.

My problem is that everything seems too run slow. I've checked
the machine thouroughly for bugs, worms, etc and I'm clean.

Sometimes when launching programs, the screen goes blank white
with a shade of grey, finally it comes back to normal.

Sometimes the machine is slow in responding to ALT + TAB when
changing programs.

A lot of times the print doesn't appear on the screen as fast
as I'm typing, and believe me I am no speed demon at typing.

What can I do to check this machine, or what other info do I
need to supply to have my question answered?

AuthenticAMD AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
320MB RAM
58% system resources free
Windows-managed swap file on drive C (7187MB free)
Available space on drive C: 7183MB of 12397MB (FAT32)

IRQ 10 RAGE IIC AGP (English)

Even a 166 MHz K6 computer is fast enough for Internet use, especially
when it's through dial-up. So I suggest you first reducing the amount
of memory to either 64M or 256M because some Socket 7 motherboards
can't cache more than that much and run very sluggishly if any more is
installed. A system running Windows pre-2000 with 64M isn't very fast
because of all the disk access, but it'll still be faster than a
system running much more memory than it can cache.
But if your hard drive is nearly full, that can also slow down
Windows.

 

[Cyde Weys]

In addition to all of your excellent advice, I would like to emphasize
one of your points. Consistent system slowdown is typical of
spyware-infested computers. From my impression of , he/she isn't
very technically-oriented when it comes to computers, i.e. not knowing
the CPU speed (not that that's a bad thing, probably has other
priorities). I would heavily emphasize the use of Ad-Aware and Spybot:
Search & Destroy to get rid of anything that could be stealing resources
by running in the background. Also, this person may be running
non-adware background processes that nevertheless are using up CPU
resources, like instant messenger clients, browser/editor quickload
apps, WeatherBug, mp3 player/RealMedia quicklaunchers, etc. Cleaning a
lot of this kind of stuff out of the auto-startup will help free up
resources on "old" computers.

 

[Trent©]

In addition to all of your excellent advice, I would like to emphasize
one of your points. Consistent system slowdown is typical of
spyware-infested computers. From my impression of , he/she isn't
very technically-oriented when it comes to computers, i.e. not knowing
the CPU speed (not that that's a bad thing, probably has other
priorities). I would heavily emphasize the use of Ad-Aware and Spybot:
Search & Destroy to get rid of anything that could be stealing resources
by running in the background. Also, this person may be running
non-adware background processes that nevertheless are using up CPU
resources, like instant messenger clients, browser/editor quickload
apps, WeatherBug, mp3 player/RealMedia quicklaunchers, etc. Cleaning a
lot of this kind of stuff out of the auto-startup will help free up
resources on "old" computers.

Who were you writing to, Cyde?

You might do some research on how to reply to a Usenet post.


Have a nice week...

Trent

Follow Joan Rivers' example --- get pre-embalmed!

 

[DevilsPGD]

In message <<[email protected]>> Trent©

You might do some research on how to reply to a Usenet post.

Most of us can figure it out from the References line.

Quotes are nice, but if you're able to intelligently discuss hardware,
you should be able to figure out a References header (or at least find a
newsreader that does it for you)