What would you rather do first? Add memory or faster hard drive to 400sc?

[MuffD]

Just got my daughter a new 400sc. Right now, it has the 40gb Seagate drive that it came with and 512mb PC2700 samsung DDR but it seems like it could use a little pep. Would you guys recommend I upgrade the memory to Dual Channel DDR or upgrade to a hard drive that has an 8mb cache?


TIA

 

[tk11]

I wouldn't upgrade either just for the sake of "pep". If performance is poor while performing a specific task then state the task and ask what what can be done to improve your systems ability to perform that task.

 

[Sonic587]

What's the rest of the specs?

Also, what does she use this computer for?

 

[MuffD]

Here are the specs:
2.26 P4
512mb pc 2700 (not dual channel)
40gb Seagate
Dying Maxtor 250gb that's going to be removed this week.
ATI AIW 8500dv
Lite-On CDRW.

Booting up it seems kind of sluggish. As the pc is trying to start all the scheduled startup services, you can see the pc kind of lag. The machine is primarily used for children games, tv, internet surfing.

Keep in mind that this has a fresh install of XP Pro with sp2.

 

[XeonTux]

Dying Maxtor 250gb that's going to be removed this week.

lets see how it runs after that

 

[MuffD]

Xeontux,
I'll remove this tonight or tomorrow and give it a whirl. Hopefully this is the bottleneck since that would be "cheap" to fix.

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: XeonTux

Dying Maxtor 250gb that's going to be removed this week.

lets see how it runs after that

yup a dying hd can cause all sorts of problems & slowdowns, also how long as it been since it's been formatted & clean install of windows?

 

[KoolDrew]

The system is fine for her needs. I would not really upgrade anything but do take the dying Maxtor out. Also read the guide to free performance in the sticky in the software forum.

 

[MuffD]

Thanks again everyone. I will post my results probably tonight when I get off of work.

 

[HaroldW]

If removing the dying hard drives does not work, try removing service pack 2. Many people have had problems with service pack 2 slowing down things (myself included.) As soon as I uninstalled service pack 2 it spead up again

 

[MuffD]

I removed the hard drive and it works much better. The intial startup now does not take as long. I might experiment and remove sp2 to see if this helps a little more as well.

Thanks for everyones help!