Im new and having problems here.......

[mike the newbie 0]

I put together an older dell, it was using the FAT32 format, I changed it to NFTS 'cause file sharing on live messenger was not possible, now its slower than molasses, and when I mean slow.................munning windows xp on a dell dimension,20gb hard drive , 384 mb ram , with a pentium III at 930 MHz. Any ideas would be very helpfull!

[jmmijo 1]

A couple of things to note on this, what is the exact model of that Dell, it's a Dimension series so that narrows it down a bit for sure.

 

Also note that most likely you are using the onboard graphics, for an old Socket 370, Pentium 3 machine, this would most likely be an Intel 810e or 815e chipset.

 

Not the best for graphics and would cause some slow downs for sure.

 

Another thing to note, on slower machines that are running less then 512MB will cause further slow-downs.

 

If that model supports either a single stick of 512MB or a pair of 256MB sticks, then I would upgrade that as well to at least a total memory of 512MB.

 

As soon as you can determine what the exact model Dimension you have then we can check if it has an AGP slot for another graphics card and which motherboard chipset it uses

[mike the newbie 0]

Well, like I said, I'm a newbie at this, I had to swap out the video card, it was toast, . I'm guessing it was an AGP, 'cause the slot is further in and its a brown slot, while the rest are white and closer to the back of the machine. The old video card is a nvidia gforce 2mx. Its the dell dimension 4100. Im not sure where to find info on the motherboard chipset.

 

[DosFreak 2]

A P3-933 with even just 384mb should be blazing fast.

 

I setup my brother with a K63-400 with 384mb a couple of years ago so something must be up with that P3....

[jmmijo 1]

Originally Posted By: DosFreak

A P3-933 with even just 384mb should be blazing fast.

I setup my brother with a K63-400 with 384mb a couple of years ago so something must be up with that P3....

Hmm, I've never gotten Windows XP to run at a decent rate on anything less then a Celeron 2GHz or faster with at least 512MB of memory.

Perhaps I'm a bit more jaded when it comes to what I consider speedy and what is not

@mike the newbie, as for the replacement graphics card, what did you get to replace the older GeForce 2 card ?!?

Anything that is a GeForce 4 series or better should be fine, however, the MX series is really not quite up to par as it's a low end type of part.

Also the ATi Radeon 9xxx series can be had for cheap too

[mike the newbie 0]

I do have the mx series video card in there, but I'm gonna swap the 128 ram with the 256 and see what happens. I unplugged the machine and let it sit for 10 minutes and booted it up, and its a little faster, but I would like to see it faster even more. Thanks for the inout, and I will post on any changes.

Mike

 

[jmmijo 1]

This was a fresh/new install of Windows XP correct ?!?

 

Also, did you d/l the latest chipset/inf drivers along with the latest graphics card and DX9.0c as well ?!?