Computers 101: Hard drive, RAM, Memory.

I've never understood the relationship of hard drive capacity to RAM to system resources to whatever. Can someone give me a short-course explanation and tell me if I have enough stuff for today's needs? I have the following: Intel Pentium II with MMX, 300 Total RAM: 192 MB. 5 GB hard drive. System resources: 58 percent free. Don't play computer games much, but have lots of applications going, such as McAfee, Popup Ad Filter, Zone Alarm, a calendar program, Webshots photos, Ad-aware, Easy CD Creator. Also, how do I shut down some of the applications so they are running only when I want to use them? Do I just exit using the shortcut on the Desktop? Thanks.

 

I'm sure someone will help me out here, but here's the short of it. Given what you are running I would say you're pushing it just a bit. Although it depends on how your system responds. If it seems sluggish or just plain slow then your tasking it a bit too hard. The pop up filter probably doesn't eat a lot of resources, and neither will Ad-Aware. The virus scanner and firewall will consume a good bit and I don't know about Webshots or the calendar program.

What operating system are you using? If you are using anything except Windows 2000 you can go to Start>Run type msconfig and press enter. Go to the startup tab and uncheck the programs that you don't want to run. They will launch automatically if needed but they won't run at startup which will free up some resources for you.

You may consider adding some RAM to your rig. That would help a good deal. Depending on your motherboard it would most likely hold 384Mb of RAM. If you want to add hardware then we really need some more detailed specs of your system.

 

At this moment I am on a PII450, 192megs ram, 10gig HD & I have 76% resources free. Running programs are MSM Messenger, Zone Alarm, Ram Idle, AVG Anti-Virus & IE. Of course along with Explorer & Systray. If your not using EZ Cd Creator at the moment you can surely shut that down.

As far as ram goes...I've been told by many people that this board supports 256meg chips? but I'm here to tell it doesn't. I've tried using them and it wouldn't boot at all. I put the 128meg chips back in & wahlah, booted just fine. So 384 would be our max I think.

The system listed in my sig is down at the moment. Waiting on replacement parts to come in. Seems the PS took a dump & distroyed my MB & CPU.

Chris