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Why is my machine slowing down?

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Hi Leo, Can you help me with this? I have windoes xp sp2 up untill 13/06/06 i had 2.09 GHz CPU & 512 mb of Ram . Now i have 1.25GHz CPU & 512MB of Ram. Why can this be ? Can this be reset if so how ?
Thanks,
Graham.

Posted by: Graham John Burnett at June 18, 2006 2:38 PM

That sounds like a hardware issue. You sure you're using the same computer? :-) I'd be looking at the motherboard... losing ram happens from time to time, but having the CPU drop speed like that is odd. You might also check BIOS settings for both, but ultimately it could be many different things. Might be worth having a tech look at the box.

Posted by: Leo at June 19, 2006 5:11 PM

Hi,

I have a 3.4GHZ CPU and 2GB DDR Memory. Yet sometimes the machine appears jumpy and definately slows down. Surely with the CPU & RAM that I have this shouldn't happen. I don't run any excessive programs.

Any help appreciated. Thanks.


Peter.

Posted by: Peter McCluskey at July 28, 2006 9:02 AM

There's one more thing that Leo didn't mention but I see a lot of... check your available hard drive space. A new computer will have plenty, but if it's more than 4 years old you may be running low. A computer running Windows XP or 2000 should have, at the minimum, 750MB to 1GB free for optimal performance. To see what you have, open My Computer, right click on the hard drive labeled C:, and click Properties.

Posted by: Chris at August 27, 2006 2:19 PM

Hi! i have a pretty knew hp pavillion dv8000 media center laptop, with 512 ddr and 180 hd,I know my ram is not that bad, but when i try to open MSN Messenger, the program freezes or takes a few minutes before it opens, i really need to fix this! please help!

Posted by: abraham at September 23, 2006 4:00 AM

Hi Leo, I have a notebook 1.5gh and 256Ram - The machine was slowing down so I cleaned the register and runned all kind of antispyware on it...yet the trouble seems to be that the RAM lowered to 192MB Could you please give me any tip for it ? thanks

Posted by: Giuliano at October 23, 2006 3:37 AM

My machine has 1.25g of ram and two harddrives. one has 80gb and the other has 240gb of storage. My machine randomly runs the harddrive for restore points when there is no activity, but mine will not stop when activity returns to the computer, which cause the responce to be extremely slow. I tried stopping the monitoring of the harddrives but that fail miserably. Need advise

Posted by: Garet Hartshorn at December 8, 2006 6:03 PM

Hi Leo,
Got a problem with Media Player. It runs fine until it suddenly starts using 90%+ of my cpu...
I'm running an AMD Athlon 3500+ with 1gb ram and a 250 GB HDD...
Any Sugestions?

Posted by: Brad at February 4, 2007 7:05 AM

In a previous post (“That sounds like a hardware issue. You sure you're using the same computer? :-) I'd be looking at the motherboard... losing ram happens from time to time, but having the CPU drop speed like that is odd. You might also check BIOS settings for both, but ultimately it could be many different things. Might be worth having a tech look at the box. Posted by: Leo at June 19, 2006 05:11 PM”) you had mentioned that a loss of RAM sometimes happens however, you did not mention why it sometimes happens or if it is something that can be repaired\restored. You did make mention of checking the BIOS settings but I am unsure what that would require. My computer (emachines W3410) came with a 512MB RAM chip\card, whenever the heck it is. Now it is reporting as having only 382.5 MB RAM. This is ticking me off no end. Therefore, I am seeking your advice or opinion about this situation and any possible remedies that may be available to me.

Thank you,
Jon

Posted by: Jon at March 24, 2007 7:48 PM

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The BIOS settings are available when you first boot your machine. Typically you
have to press a key (F8, Del, F2 ... it varies from machine to machine) in
order to enter the BIOS configuration before Windows boots. On many machines
the memory configuration is listed - and sometimes controlable - there.

More commonly one of the memory cards on your system might fail such that it
looks like it's not there.

A couple of memory testing programs:
http://ask-leo.com/d-memtest
http://ask-leo.com/d-msmemtest

Good luck!

Leo
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Posted by: Leo Notenboom at March 25, 2007 10:53 AM
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