Hi,

I have a standard emachines 420, bought from Dixon, which is 256MB RAM with 2.6 GB processor, Intel Celeron. I found out the PC is running with slow when I tried to run some analysis. Can you please advice me which is the best solution for upgrading my PC? Increase RAM, if it is, up to what? Or it is because it is Intel Celeron? Alternatively, should I just buy another PC? If it is possible, can you tell me some recommendations for which brand and type I should choose to upgrade? I am much appreciated for your reply.

Many thanks,
Christina

extra RAM would help a lot ..have you got any spyware etc on your PC ?

Pop along and follow instruction here HERE

My suggestion is that you Check that your hard drive speed isn't reducing your Processor's capabilities, for example, if your Processor speed is 100Mhz and your Hard Drive runs at 50Mhz, the hard drive would be slowing the Processor down. Same with the RAM speed i guess, also, if your RAM is SDRAM, you should get DDR RAM.

Just suggestions

Just to clarify that lfost5's point, the hard drive might be a bit of a bottleneck but probably not because of the physical speed of it. Incidentally, a hard drive's speed is measured in 3 different ways (transfer rate in Mbps, spin speed in rpm and cache size in Mb) but not in MHz. The reason I say that the hard disk could still be a performance concern is that it might need defragmenting if lots of programs or data files have been installed, uninstalled or moved around on the hard disk recently.

As it's a budget PC that's still got a 2.6GHz processor, it doesn't sound like this PC is very old at all. In which case, it will definitely be DDR RAM, not SDRAM. And it shouldn't (in theory) be slow!

Christina, could you clarify what it is that makes you think the PC is running slow? You said that you did some "analysis" on it - was that a program such as Norton Utilities that did some checks and said there were problems? Or have I misunderstood?

Is it only slow when you do something in particular, e.g. using the Internet, or is it slow all the time?

Could you confirm that you're running Windows XP?

P.S. RAM is likely to help but not necessarily. It depends on what you use the PC for and how much RAM (memory) it needs to do it.