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May 13, 2005
Dear CNET members,
Happy Friday the 13th! While some of you may think that today is unlucky, I like to think the opposite is true. We have our health, our families and friends, and our helpful community of members that always pulls together and gives tech support when it's needed. So, Mitch, today is your lucky day because we have some great recommendations from our members to help spark up your snail-paced computer. Many factors may be causing your newer computer to be slower than your older one. After reading our members' submissions, one answer that came up often was to scan for spyware. While that's definitely one possibility, check out this week's winning answer by Dana, who has done a superb write-up of a whole laundry list of possibilities and steps to improve your computer's performance. But don't stop at that, because we have some awesome honorable mentions and whole slew of suggestions from our members. For all of you who have additional tips and advice beyond what has been presented to Mitch, join in the discussion. I hope, Mitch, that you return to this discussion to tell us what worked for you. Take care, everyone, and thanks!
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Member Question of the Week
We have a Dell Dimension 2400 P4 2.4GHz at home that runs slower than my old Gateway Pentium 500MHz. I upped the Dell memory to 768MB from 256MB and saw a marginal improvement. It also has XP Home SP2 on it. The other machine is never going to see Service Pack 2 after what we have experienced. Any guidance on speeding up the "new" 2.4-gigabyte monster that is turning out to be a giga-snail?
Submitted by:
Mitch C.
Hi Mitch. You did not give us a whole lot of information to go on here such as: Did the Dell run well at first and has now slowed down, or has it always run slowly? Did it slow down only after installing Service Pack 2? If so, check the Dell Web site for the latest drivers and issues with SP2. When you say slow, is this for specific tasks such as the Internet or just slow on everything? All things being equal, your Dell should perform far better than your 500MHz computer running Windows XP. One note on upgrading memory: many people think that double the memory means double the speed. Not so. Excluding complex tasks, such as video editing and high-resolution photo editing, for general computing, once you go beyond 256MB, the return on investment starts to diminish, and most people don't even notice a difference after 512MB. It is not like the days when increasing memory from 32MB...
Submitted by:
Dana H. of Wayland, Massachusetts
For
Dana's efforts, we're sending him his choice
efforts, we're sending them their choice of any
Help.com Learning CD.
Community Buzz
 Each week we take a look at topics discussed in the forums.
Best regards and enjoy!
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Check out next week's question:
I am a mom desiring to take sports photos of my kids, and I haven't found a camera that can take great zoom and action shots. What are some of detailed feature sets in a digital camera that I should be looking for that will allow me to capture these moments? I'm fairly new to all this, so the more detailed the explanations, the better off I will be in making my decision. I'm not looking to spend a whole lot of money, just something midrange. Thanks.
--Submitted by:
Kathy P.
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