Any way to increase memory without adding ram?

[jyates]

Hi all,

I've got an older Gateway Solo 9300 laptop that has a PIII 600 processor
and 256mb of ram in it. According to what I can find the ram is maxed out.
It has 2 128mb sodimms and 32mb onboard. It has a 20gb hard drive in it.

I'm running windows xp professional and I get messages from windows telling
me I'm low on memory and sometimes the hard drive light stays on like the hard
drive is "dumping" files or something and it freezes up during that time until it's
through "dumping".

Is there any way to do anything within windows to help it out?

Thanks,
Jim

 

[mpilchfamily]

XP is running bare minimum on 256mb of RAM. The message about running out of memory is in reference to the virtual memory. For that you just need free HDD space. If you don't have at least 4Gb of free HDD space you don't have much room for VM or for the system to do anything else. A defrag would be a good thing but once again you need that free space so it can defrag. What i would suggest is finding a copy of Win 98 or ME. Thats what originaly came on the Laptop and it will fuction much better and faster.

 

[TemjinGold]

You could buy a cheap HD that's much larger and swap out that 20 gig. That would give you a lot more virtual memory space. Using Win98 or Win2000 wouldn't be a bad idea either as they have a smaller footprint than XP (I wouldn't recommend ME personally.) If you can't get those, you might want to try the Win7 RC as I believe that is also lighter than XP.

 

[jyates]

I checked and I've got over 12gb of free space on the HD currently and about all it's used for is to browse the internet. I've got a wireless card in it and I carry it for internet access when I'm on the road.

I'll try the defrag and see if that works. I've got a clean copy of Win98SE but I prefer using XP Pro.

If it doesn't get any better I'll spend a few bucks and get a newer laptop that will run XP without the excessive grinding.

Thanks,
Jim

 

[rlim111]

256MB RAM running on XP??? (O_O), like mpilchfamily say that you can defrag your computer or free more space for your data to breath but it does not help much.

I only worry about your laptop, maybe you can replace your laptop with the better one?

 

[TemjinGold]

Since you've got the space, try going into virtual memory settings and increasing the size of your pagefile.

Oh defrag it first.

 

[Pantlegz]

one thing to keep in mind, Virtual memory and pagefile will kill your HDD faster, and if they're on the boot drive it'll slow everything in windows down when it's using virtual memory.

 

[jyates]

Originally posted by: Pantlegz1
one thing to keep in mind, Virtual memory and pagefile will kill your HDD faster, and if they're on the boot drive it'll slow everything in windows down when it's using virtual memory.

Thanks for the tip......I'll try it out and if it's not workable I'll swap it back to the way it used to be and just move on to a newer laptop.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: mpilchfamily
XP is running bare minimum on 256mb of RAM. The message about running out of memory is in reference to the virtual memory. For that you just need free HDD space. If you don't have at least 4Gb of free HDD space you don't have much room for VM or for the system to do anything else. A defrag would be a good thing but once again you need that free space so it can defrag. What i would suggest is finding a copy of Win 98 or ME. Thats what originaly came on the Laptop and it will fuction much better and faster.

I've had it running on 64, MS says 128 is min, but IMHO 512 is the smallest amount you SHOULD be running on it, and even then I prefer a 1GB min

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: Pantlegz1
one thing to keep in mind, Virtual memory and pagefile will kill your HDD faster.

I somewhat doubt this is true, do you have any documents to back this up? It will see more wear this is true, but I doubt this has any tangible impact on drive longevity

 

[jyates]

Originally posted by: TemjinGold
Since you've got the space, try going into virtual memory settings and increasing the size of your pagefile.

Oh defrag it first.

I tried the virtual memory settings and bumped them up and so far so good. I don't see the laptop 'lagging out" like it was before.

Thanks,
Jim

 

[PottedMeat]

What other junk are you running? I've run XP Pro on a 1Ghz P3 256MB PC100 30GB compaq armada laptop with firefox/visual C#/MPLAB/antivir/EagleCAD all running at the same time and rarely had notices like that.

 

[TemjinGold]

Originally posted by: jyates

Originally posted by: TemjinGold
Since you've got the space, try going into virtual memory settings and increasing the size of your pagefile.

Oh defrag it first.

I tried the virtual memory settings and bumped them up and so far so good. I don't see the laptop 'lagging out" like it was before.

Thanks,
Jim

Glad that worked!