Jen left for the Gym this morning without me. I was sleeping in because I was tired from staying up late last night. I really need to go with her on Saturday mornings. This is the second week in a row that I have not gone with her.
When she got back home I had already changed the air filters, begun laundry, and flipped the mattress. We have a system where we flip the mattress every month. On even-numbered months we flip it on the long-axis and on odd-numbered months we flip it on the short axis.
Jen and I each took a shower and then headed out to take care of some things.
We drove up to Perimeter and stopped at Best Buy. We wanted to use the remaining balance on our gift card to buy another set of headphones like Jen got when we had our last horrible experience at Best Buy.
They didn't have the headphones we were looking for so we left. Next we drove to Costco. It was 1:15pm so Costco was pretty crazy (as it is always on the weekend). Jen bought a two-year supply of Contacts (she loves the FSA!) and we got some groceries and supplies.
After Costco we went to Jen's office to pick up a package. On Wednesday I bought another 1GB of RAM from Newegg and it arrived on Friday but Jen wasn't in the office so we got it today.
We headed back towards home and stopped at the Best Buy on Cumberland to check for those headphones. They had them. We bought the headphones and were happy to sever our ties with Best Buy.
When we got home I set out to work on installing the new RAM. For quite some time now the desktop computer (freeside) running WinXP hasn't been performing as well as I would like it to be.
The symptom was a ton of HD seeking whenever I would switch programs or switch users. This was really strange and I couldn't figure it out. Once I rulled out virus/spyware issues, I defragged and ran regclean. I also uninstalled a few old programs, cleaned up the things that autostart, and disabled a couple of non-needed services. The HD was only about 60% full.
This still did not fix anything. I began to suspect that the HD was misconfigured. I checked the BIOS settings as well as the controller settings in Windows and everything was set up correctly.
Motherboard: Asus A8N-E
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3200 Winchester 200MHz FSB
RAM: Patriot 1GB DDR400 (PC3200) dual-channel 2-3-2-5 RAM
Graphics: ATI Radeon X800PRO 256MB GDDR3 PCIe
HD: Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD4000KD 400GB 7200 RPM SATA-150 w/16MB cache
After some more research and not coming up with anything I came to the conclusion that the system is simply going to the pagefile way too often. I thought 1GB of RAM would be plenty and this wouldn't be an issue, but it is. When I would close down
So I was really curious to see if this RAM upgrade would solve any of these problems. It seemed the easiest and cheapest solution as I didn't think it was necessary to build a new system. I decided that if this doesn't work I'll re-install XP.
It was a piece of cake to install the two RAM modules. I got the same kind as before to ensure compatibility. When I got the sticks seated and the computer put back together, I messed around in the BIOS and changed a few settings. I noticed that the RAM was auto-detected as DDR333 and not DDR400. I switched to manual configuration and fixed this. I also decided to use the built-in BIOS 'AI Overclocking' at 10% faster speed. These settings didn't work - it would not boot, so I tried to lower the overclocking to 5% and it locked up during the boot screen of windows, so I just turned off the overclocking altogether.
Once that was taken care of I got into Windows and verified that the 2GB of RAM was detected. I also did some tests and was happy to see that it isn't paging nearly as much as it used to, even after coming out of a memory-hungry app like Oblivion.
I think that the problem is solved!
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