I've got an OEM HP pavilion xt914. It was a pretty good system, but now it barely supports Windows XP. (It was sold as an XP ready machine.) Rather than buying a whole new system, I'd like to tweak this one if possible. Mostly it is used for internet, writing letters/word processing, and downloaded games. It's got an Nvidia GEforce 3200 and an ethernet card installed. Basically I'm just looking for some performance improvement.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jason
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That holds I believe max 2 sticks of 256 mB pc 100 sdram, with an 800 or so megahertz celeron processor. That's pleny to run XP.

Check how much ram you have. If it's 64 or 128 mB, upgrading the ram will definitely improve the performance, but my experience is that for normal users not doing much graphics or audio/video processing [not viewing, that's easy on the system, but file processing] you really won't see much benefit if you go over 256mB total.

You can buy that memory here, from crucial.com, which is who we use for all our memory needs. Or you can shop around, just don't buy no name memory, look for micron, samsung, kensington, corsair.

Unfortunately, sdram is no longer cheap, you might also look to see if you can find some used locally, new that costs about $90.

If you have one stick in there, I'd just buy the 256mB stick and add that, get the pc133 from crucial, it will run slightly better.

Also, make sure to defrag the harddrive, that should be done at least monthly.

If you are running norton antivirus, consider uninstalling it in favor of a lighter weight, and also free, product like AVG, that link goes to where you can download it, not their homepage, which is confusing. Norton is a notorious resource hog.

Otherwise your machine should be running fine, that processor is fine for XP. But if you don't have enough memory, that's where to spend the money.

To defrag: start -> programs -> accessories -> system tools -> disk defragmenter.

Also check your Internet explorer cache, make sure it's not cluttered with junk, delete all the files from the cache, then set the cache to about 50mB, which is fine. IE -> tools -> Internet Options -> General tab -> Temporary internet files click delete and then change the 'settings' to a more reasonable size, like 50-60 mB.

For your recycle bin, set that to about 300 mB or so, that also reduces system clutter. Right click on recycle bin icon, select properties, then set the size.
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