Newly Built Desktop EXTREMELY Slow

[dan246]

I just put my 6th computer together yesterday and am very displeased with the results. The installation went smooth apart from some difficulty attaching the heat sink and fan for the CPU. It took a little more force than I am used to but I don't believe I damaged any components in the process. I originally used two sticks of Transcend 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM ECC Registered DDR 266 memory but after a failure to initiate the POST I switched the sticks out for one of the sticks mentioned below in the specs. The computer currently has 2 IDE hard drives, one 20gb system drive and one 60gb data drive. I installed a brand new authentic copy of WinXP home edition and was quite dissatisfied at the speed in which it installed. It didn't improve from there. The computer is extremely sluggish and I have a very unhappy customer. I would like to blame it on the lack of memory (only 256mb) but I don't think that is the biggest problem. I would like to think the combination of components I used would produce a relatively fast machine. The system seems pretty stable. No crashes, POST errors, or anything of that nature. Any hints on how I should go about speeding this computer up? Is the problem because of faulty parts or poor compatibility?

Specs (Desc. from Newegg)
JUST PC 706ATXBK Case 550W ATX12V P4 SATA Power Supply
Kingston ValueRAM 256MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
ASUS Black 16X DVD-ROM 52X CD-R 32X CD-RW 52X CD-ROM
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 2.0GHz 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor
ASUS A8N-VM CSM Socket 939 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

PS: I will gladly post more information on request.

TIA.

~Dan

 

[brinks]

It's your ram and hard drive.

A 20GB hard drive is pretty old.
You should get atleast 512MB of ram.

 

[KBlair]

Transcend 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM ECC Registered DDR 266

It would not boot up because, even though the motherboard can take DDR266 ECC RAM, it cannot take Registered RAM. Unbuffered only.

 

[dan246]

Thanks for the fast replies. I'll try upgrading the memory to 512mb and ordering a SATA drive. Hopefully that will do the trick.

 

[gmanych]

Its definitly your RAM

 

[twopointshotdr]

Ram and Harddrive....and well besides that....installing windows is a problem in itsself

 

[dan246]

Got a new SATA drive and 512MB of RAM. That seemed to do the trick. Thanks for all the replies. One more question though. I want to add another stick of memory to another computer I just built (the stick I just replaced with 2x256MB sticks). The memory is identical so I'm not mixing different sticks. Do I need to reinstall the OS or can I just add the memory and XP will 'find' it?

 

[Camshaft]

you will be able just to add the RAM

 

[jordo_99]

Yeah, you won't need to reinstall anything. I upgraded memory on my laptop last year and all I had to do was turn it off, put in the RAM, and turn it on and it worked.

 

[ricanflow]

Got a new SATA drive and 512MB of RAM. That seemed to do the trick. Thanks for all the replies. One more question though. I want to add another stick of memory to another computer I just built (the stick I just replaced with 2x256MB sticks). The memory is identical so I'm not mixing different sticks. Do I need to reinstall the OS or can I just add the memory and XP will 'find' it?

You never have to reinstall windows when adding hardware, except if you replace your hard drive, and even then you can just use disc wizard and clone youre current drive.