RAM Problems

I like to help my neighbor with her computer cause shes new at it. She has a nice machine its an AMD 1.2Ghz with 256mbs of ram. She was complaining about the computer being laggy so i defraged both her drives and cleaned up all the junk file and checked for spyware and viruses (i found no viruses). It helped a little but it was still laggy (it was slow opening common programs like word and even getting windows fully loaded after reboot took a long time). i noticed the available ram was only 60mbs in idle mode out of the possible 256. Anyone know how i can permanently increase this or how to find the memory leak if there is one? do you think the computer is slow because of this low ram?

thanks

What OS is on this computer?

My guess would be shared video memory. Onboard graphics generally use part of the system ram as video memory. You should be able to adjust this in the bios settings. If this is the case, I'll bet it's set to 64MB. This would certainly explain the low amount that's available.

Also, you might check to see if there are a lot of unecessary startup tasks and services(2000/XP). A good guide for disabling unecessary services can be found at http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

She might consider adding more ram. you can pick up 128 or 256MB pretty cheap these days.

Good luck.

alright thanks i will go check that out. more ram cant hurt 128 mbs more will be enough for her. Thanks man. Her OS is WIN XP

you can increase the size of the page file also

how do i increase the page file? is that the amount of memory stored on the hard drive?

It's probably not necessary. If you run out of virtual memory, windows will tell you about it. By default, windows allocates more than enough virtual memory for the general user.