[fishguts182]

hello I have a question. Right now I have a dell demension 4300 with a pentium processor running at 1.40 GHZ and 256 MB of ram. I noticed it has been running slower and I am considering two things. Put in 1 gb of ram or install a new processor a celeron D at 3.33 GHZ with one gig of ram. What would be better? I use my computer for typing school reports, downloading music on itunes, and surfing th web. I also soon plan to install a DVD burner on the computer. Any help would be appreciated.

[Trotter]

A gradual slowdown would be more of stuff running in the background. Start out by getting rid of most of the background processes.

MSCONFIG (when used with the RUN command) opens up the System Configuration Utility. Most of the stuff in there you don't want to mess with unless you know what you are doing or have detailed instructions.

Click Start, then click Run. Type in "MSCONFIG" without the quotes. Clcik OK.

Click the STARTUP tab. The list that it pulls up is everything that you can choose to start up when Windows does.

Why is all of this stuff in the list? Because every program designer thinks his 'creation' is so indispensible that no one could possibly want it to NOT start up with their computer (yeah, right), so they set it into the list and have it to do just that.

Once you're at the list, look it over and see what all has a check mark. Every program that does starts up when Windows loads... EVERYTIME!

If something is checked, but you don't know what it is, Google it and find out.

Once you have seen what is there, uncheck everything that you don't need or want. Keep your firewall, antivirus, broadband drivers, graphics drivers, whatever you absolutely have to have, but uncheck everythign else.

Once you are done, click APPLY, OK, then reboot.

When your computer starts up, you'll get a grey box about the System Configuration Utility. Check the box about 'Don't run on startup' then OK.

If you had a lot of stuff checked, then your comp ought to start up faster and run more stable.

[StylinGolfShoes]

What kind of pentium processor is that, is it pentium 3 or 4,
that seems like a decent upgrade, buy you have to consider a few things, I personally would suggest getting all new motherboard, RAM and processor and run an AMD processor, which you can get fora lot less than Intels.

Heres a Setup:

Processor:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103733

Motherboard:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813186105

RAM:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820161067

That is about $300 after shipping

[fishguts182]

Its a pentium 4 processor. I do not have experience with AMD, are they reliable processors?

[M733mhz]

Yes AMD makes very good processors, but I don't think a total upgrade is what you need considering you don't use your computer for things that would require it. Follow what trotter told you to do, if you keep the system clean it should stay running like the day you bought it.