Should I beef up on memory?

[bills976]

Well, I need some advice regarding a sluggish system.

My son in college has an IBM ThinkPad T30 (1.8 GHz P4, 256MB RAM, 40 GB HD, but 16 MB Radeon mobility video card). He's noticed a marked decrease in performance lately and wants to add some more memory. XP Professional starts up much slower than when he originally got it (8/2002), and he has removed that Windows Update patch that was talked about here that robs performance. Programs in general also load very slowly, especially Outlook, Visual Studio, and even IE. I suspect the video card more than anything else, but he insists that adding more memory will help.

I'm wondering if a simple 256MB upgrade will make that much of a difference. First of all, will it? Also, is the video card the real problem here? He doesn't use graphics intensive programs - the real slowdowns occur when starting and using programs like Visual C++ and whatnot.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Timco]

More memory will defintely help. Your son should also look into what else is running in the background. That is what is probably slowing the system down.

[firephoto]

More memory might help, but it sounds like there's just some things running all the time that don't need to be. MSN/windows messenger likes to run all the time if you don't jump through the hoops to keep it from doing so. It also starts with outlook all the time now reguardless of what you do. One of those handy updates that came along, probably packed inside a security update of course. You might have him install Ad-Aware and check for some spyware that might be running all the time.
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/
jv16 PowerTools is handy too for getting rid of running processes and startup items you don't need. You have to be carefull not to remove any registry entries that you might need tho.
http://www.jv16.org

I've had the same general slowdown with XP on my Athlon 1800+ since last fall too. Things were running really fast, fast boot ups, etc. But now it takes as long to load the desktop as my old P233 laptop with win98. I'm really not sure what's caused this but my mom has a p3 650r and it boots xp really fast. I've been running Mandrake 9.1 for a few weeks now and have learned enough that XP has become the backup when I need to use some windows only programs.

[bills976]

Thanks firephoto. He did an adaware scan and it turned up some things, but nothing really significant, mostly IE cookies. I'll try jv16 and see if that helps, and of course I'll backup the registry. I've got a desktop with XP Home which boots up fine - same memory, slightly slower processor to boot (1.6 v. 1.8GHz), but better video card.

Timco - he almost needs to run multiple programs in the background. He'll be working on a project with friends over IM, doing research on the net, and having Visual Studio open all at once. The more I think about it, the more likely an upgrade will be necessary. The laptop can take up to 1 GB.... but I'm leaning more towards a total of 512 MB since I think a 2x increase in RAM should be sufficient because the slowdowns don't yet make the macine unusable, they just make it annoying to use. If he goes through with it, he'll probably order from Crucial... I've heard all but good things about them. Has anyone had any experiences to the contrary?

Thanks!

[gcutler]

XP will do fine with 256MB ram if you watch out for your programs running in background. If you had 128MB, you would be banging your head against the screen. 512MB really just buys you the ability to not worry as much what is running in the background. And 1GB with XP would probably be a waste of ram unless you are running some heavy duty memory hog apps.

The past 6 PCs I've had I have always bought Crucial and the memory is very good. I used to only trust Kingston memory (having worked with alot of cheapo stuff), now I added Crucial to my list of trust, and they are significantly cheaper.

[Bogey62]

XP will do fine with 256MB ram if you watch out for your programs running in background. If you had 128MB, you would be banging your head against the screen. 512MB really just buys you the ability to not worry as much what is running in the background. And 1GB with XP would probably be a waste of ram unless you are running some heavy duty memory hog apps.

The past 6 PCs I've had I have always bought Crucial and the memory is very good. I used to only trust Kingston memory (having worked with alot of cheapo stuff), now I added Crucial to my list of trust, and they are significantly cheaper.

A very simple rule of thumb for any M$ OS: whatever they say the RAM requirements are, double it.