Hi, could anyone advise me on what sort of ram I need for my pc as it has to be the same (EDO, FPM, SDRAM, RAMBUS etc) before I open up & start having a look on the motherboard, I've searched the house for the manual & spec but cannot find it & I ain't phoning the tech help-line at a pound a min!!! the make is 'time' model no. 24003FA90G4 (AMD Athlon XP2400+), its about 3-4yrs old, I've only just realised I've only got 224mb of ram & windows XP is eating this up along with other applications that i have running plus I'm doing more on his pc than just browsing the net, i've increased the capacity on the virtual memory so are up to my limit, I've searched the web to find some info but cannot find anything on it (any suggestions for forums?) Also I had a webpage saved that had tips on shutting off certain background processes or whatever in XP but its not up anymore, any websites offering this info.? I've heard of nlite & tinyxp but that totally strips it down to bear minimum (i usually have that running on the laptop when using ableton so I can run various effects etc through the channels without it sapping ram & processing power, I don't want to do that on this pc has it's got alot of important stuff on it ..don't want to risk crashing the whole thing!) thanks in advance.

oh dear,

that amount of memory is a crime LMAO

IMO 1gb is "just enough" for todays PC user.

Firstly download this and check the report it produces, this will tell you all your important system specs and i can then advise you better on how to proceed.
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well, a cheap 256 ddr graphics card £50

and 1 sticks of ram ddr 3200, prob £40

you will notice a huge speed boost but personally i would just buy a new pc

your processor is quite slow, by todays standards, i would not be listening to modern magazines such as pc extreme or custom pc, that talk about computer pc's having these insane specifications

as cpu's and memory of any kind released over the past 3 years will handle games and most other things

only certain games like "4" out of the "insert insane number here" require high end over priced parts

personally i would buy a new pc, for about 400 - 500 quid, which has good memory graphics and a resonable cpu "not a budget one" that has a dvd r/w and various extras

i will have a look around, and point one out if you wish, im sure a friend of mine is selling his mini games/media centre pc, with a pda, if you want me to ask him

but seriously spending what £100 quid on increasing ur speed slightly, when u can be potentially buying a new pc within a year at a higher price seems nuts, coz ur losing out ur money,

I found this thread which seems to indicate you currently have DDR PC2100.

It'll be a 256Mb stick with 32Mb shared VGA.

Not sure I entirely agree with 1Gb being 'just enough'. Most PCs I've worked on and supplied are more than adequate on 512Mb as there is a far more noticeable jump in performance between 256 and 512 than 512 and 1Gb. Infact I ran 1Gb up until about 3 years ago when I rebuilt my main machine. I've been running 512Mb ever since and the only time I find I could do with more is if I'm opening up several large images or videos for editing.

In the original post you mentioned upping the virtual memory - this doesn't generally help as the slowdown is moving stuff from physical to virtual (and reverse) rather than the limit on the size. The general guideline is that you should set your paging file to be a fixed size at twice the size of the installed physical memory.

Time/Tiny and other similar manufacturers tend (or tended in the case of Time) to use cheap components (such as the motherboard) which can cause problems too. You could put an extra stick of memory in to see you through - if you take out the current 256 and put a higher rated 512 in you can always swop it into a new PC when you can afford to pick one up.

To give you an idea, I'm running a P4 2.5GHz with 512Mb DDR and I think the graphics card is a 256Mb GeForce4 4400 series..been that long since I put it together. That does me fine for all my needs and even stretching to games. I don't tend to bother with the overhyped stuff that required this that and the other really.

yeah 512mb will do you just nicely for doing just one thing at a time, start to run things in the background, play music, have a couple of spreadsheets open, a couple of accounting sessions, a web browser, an instant messenger and soon enough 512 will struggle.

memory is the one thing you can't have to much of, if its not used, then its not used, but having a memory bottleneck is no fun at all.

My new PC that im building has 4Gb of low latency RAM, i wont need to upgrade it for years LOL

anyways theres enough info here to be going on with
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yes 512 is "enough" but at todays prices why go for seond best, 1Gb will ensure all standard users and gamers alike will have ample room to manuever on the memory front.

i wont bother listing what i use on my computer or what i do with it LOL dont need the ego boost
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lol i only have 248mb of RAM

this link should put you in the right direction, the website will tell you which memory is compatible with your motherboard. 512 MB is plenty if your using the net, running a few light programs, like a registry cleaner, anti-virus etc. but if you have gaming in mind then the upgrade will be needed to at least 1 gig.

oh yeah I have 2 gig of ram, lightspeed.

link: http://www.crucial.com/store/listmfgr.asp?cat=RAM

Thanks for all your advice, I took out the exsisting RAM card to check what type it was & it is DDR PC2100/266mhz cl2.5 non-ecc, bought 512mb of the same ram off ebay(£30) I slotted that in the empty slot next to the other ram & its all good(736mb). Noticed the difference straight away. One happy chappie blimey if only I knew that beforehand, doing my pc maintenance course has saved me a few quid & opened my eyes up to how easy it is to upgrade!