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Did I fry my Level 2 cache?

A

AlwaysWong

Senior member
At work, I've got a Dell Dimension L550r. Lately, I've noticed a dramatic slow-down and more crunching from the HD. Is it possible to have fried my Level 2 cache? This is a suspicion of mine because now, when I load an application, close it, and open it again, it takes the same amount of time as the first (with the drive crunching away).

Please give help me troubleshoot, test, and solve this problem!

Thanks
 
It might be that you need to defragment your hard disk, that should stop some of the thrashing of the drive and speed it up some. I don't think that L2 cache will slow application loading by much, a normal L2 cache is in the region of 256-512Kb, a typical windows application is much bigger than that - about 10Mb for Internet explorer for example.

but as i said first, it's more likely to be the HD..
 
I already defragged and there's no noticeable difference. This slow-down was a "sudden" occurence... not the usual gradual reduction of performance that comes with an increasingly cluttered hard disk.

For every PC that I've used with at least a 256 KB L2 cache, IE will load slowly the first time, but MUCH quicker the second time around (assuming the cached isn't cleared with other data). That's how my pc used to be... until this "problem" arose last week. Now I'm just trying to figure out if it's hardware of software related... or both! My first instinct is the cache, but I need a way of diagnosing it (that which I do not have).

BTW - My Dell has been upgraded to 256 MB SDRAM a while back.

Thanks for your help!
 
I am not sure what chipset Dell uses in this system but its possible that the extra memory is not being cached. Windows uses memory from the top down, some chipset have a limit on the amount of memory that can be cached, the higher memory addresses would be excluded. Just a thought.
 
... but if this problem was resident in the chipset, this would have ALWAYS been a problem, correct? My difficulties arose only a few days ago.

Thanks
 
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