I have 1.25GB of Ram but its still slow

I recently had an "upgrade" to my computer. I'm rockin a Pentium 4 on a D845EBT Intel motherboard. I'm running XP Home. I have a 1GB ddr ram chip and a 256MB Ram chip. Now I know they're the same DDR because I took the 2 sticks of 512 out of this computer and put it in my old one and they work great. I just did an everest report and under "Memory Controller" theres something that says "Maximum Memory Module Size 512 MB." Does that mean I can only have 2 512's in there?

 

I just tried putting the 512's back in to the two slots and it didn't improve at all. It got a little worse.

 

Hello,
Your board will support this:

• 2.5 V (only) 184-pin DDR SDRAM DIMMs with gold-plated contacts
• Unbuffered, unregistered single-sided or double-sided DIMMs
• Maximum total system memory: 2 GB
• Minimum total system memory: 64 MB
• Maximum system memory per channel: 512MB
• 200/266 MHz DDR SDRAM DIMMs only
• Serial Presence Detect (SPD)
• Suspend to RAM
• Non-ECC and ECC DIMMs

This means that your computer can only accept 2GB of RAM overall, with a maximum of 512MB of RAM in each slot. This RAM can only be speed rated up to 266MHz. Therefore, if you have 512MB of RAM in each slot, you have maxed out your computer's RAM capability.

 

I changed the ram to one 512 in both slots and its still acting slow. It's fast for some things but other stuff it takes a good 30 seconds. For example. Opening google chrome is a breeze, try and go to a website using the address bar takes a good amount of time. Even using google it takes a while. Once i'm in a website it's just click click click. No problems with speed. Its the same with a lot of my programs. Windows Media Player opens in 2 seconds flat, but try scrolling through the music and it freezes up. I've searched on this problem and I've heard suggestions of the registry having to be cleaned up. I tried downloading a few registry cleaners but they all ask for money or will do half the job for free.

Now. My friend who previously owned this computer had the 2 512s in there and everything was fast. The only change I've made to the computers hardware is going from the 250 gig hard drive to a 380 gig hard drive. I know it shouldn't be an issue for changing the hard drive because he had a 1 tb hard drive in here before and it ran fine.

 

What's the rpm on that hard drive?

 

I'm not sure. Where would I find that info?

 

Try http://www.hdtune.com/ for hard drive information

As for a registry cleaner, the only one I can recommend is CCleaner, which can be found here: http://www.ccleaner.com/

 

I left my pc on all night last night and I just went to check out the forum and its fast! Real fast! I can minimize windows media player while having the toolbar active and it goes into the toolbar mode no problem. I don't have to wait for 30 seconds to do anything. So as far as I can see, it seems that its fixed its self. But thanks anyways!