Complete Lack of P4 performance =(

[KornNut]

I have two sticks of 512 MB RAM.

Windows recognizes the 1 Gig of RAM.

How do I check to see if a stick of RAM is defective?

 

[KornNut]

I plan on taking the following course of action (in order). Of course, if the problem has stopped at any point, I will just gladly stop trouble shooting:

(1) burn all unnecessary data (movies, etc) to discs, then delete them from the drive

(2) defragment my hard drive with Fix-It Utilities (good stuff)

(3) Try my data recovery on PC (go back to an earlier date before I installed Visual Studio)

(4) Rebuild PC

Any suggestions or problems before I start?