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Solve : XP professonal vs XP home? |
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Answer» I recently did a clean install of XP Professional onto my laptop COMPUTER. It runs slow and I wondered if Pro takes up a lot more space then the Home edition? Can I install the Home edition without having to totally wipe the drive clean and start over (losing everything I have already set up)?No. Quote from: SuzanG on November 05, 2011, 06:53:03 AM Would that make my computer run faster?No. Quote from: SuzanG on November 05, 2011, 06:53:03 AM Computer is older and does not have alot of memory or a fast processor.Can you provide some details on the hardware specs? What processor does your computer have? How much RAM? What size hard drive? And, if you can, does it use onboard/integrated video or does it have an add-on video card? Did this laptop originally come with Windows XP? Did you install Windows from a CD that came with the computer or was this edition of Windows one you bought separately from the computer? Have looked in Device Manager to see whether any yellow triangles with an exclamation mark appear there? When you installed Windows, did you also install certain device drivers? Processor is 1.40 Ghz Celeron Ram is 480 mb HD 37 Gb NTFS I do not know if onboard or integrated All hardware in device manager are fine came with XP Home and I upgraded to XP Pro originally This install was complete with total format of DISK first-XP Pro SP2 Any advise on making it run faster would be appreciated. Setting it up to give to granddaughter.This is a computer you've used for quite some TIME, right? When you say "slow", do you mean it's slower after reinstalling Windows than it was before you reinstalled Windows? Can you quantify the slowness in some way? For example, is it slow starting up? How long does it take? Do programs (Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, etc.) take longer to launch than they did before this re-installation of Windows? What make and model is it? I have used it occassionally for a long time-since new in 2005. It is slow when it starts up and when opening programs-pretty much all programs it seems. Not sure if it is slower then before but thought by reinstalling and starting over completely, it would be faster with these two things. Any suggestions? I have defragmented the disk and run cleaners etc.Did you install up-to-date drivers from the manufacturer for the various components?Well, a few options for improving performance come to mind but two of them involve some cost, so I'm not sure you want to spend money on it. Those two options are adding RAM if the computer can accommodate more RAM, and replacing the hard drive with a faster, higher-capacity, one. Without knowing the make and model of the computer, we can not tell whether your computer can unitize more RAM. The other option which involves no cost is increasing the amount of RAM designated for the video function of the computer. As it stands now, I believe 32MB of the RAM is designated/allocated/shared for video/screen display. I DERIVED the 32MB figure by subtracting the 480MB figure in your first post from the amount of physically installed in your computer, which if probably 512MB. If the computer will allow increasing video RAM to 64MB, that may improve performance, at least for some tasks. For a discussion about doing this, see How to increase my video RAM? If your computer can handle 1GB of RAM, that would probably yield noticeable improvement. Again, we need the make and model. Note: I'm also still wondering about this: Quote from: BC_Programmer on November 05, 2011, 01:15:08 PM Did you install up-to-date drivers from the manufacturer for the various components?Oops, I knew I was forgetting something. It is an HP Pavilion ze4900. Yes, I did update all the drivers. Will try your suggestion regarding video RAM. Thank you. By their very nature, laptops are less powerful than a proper desktop computer. Maxing out the RAM, (take the scan at www.crucial.com, to see what you have and what you can install and how much it will cost. Heck, if you want to buy the best ram available, you can order it right there. I do this all the time for my customers.) Then, due to the slower CPU (a Celeron is the very bottom of the heap, in CPU's) you will need to seriously limit the number of TSR's and Services that run in the background. You need to shut down absolutely everything that's not required to run Windows. I do all this for my laptop customers all the time and I can usually double the efficiency of most laptops. But it takes more tweaking and tuning than I'm prepared to tell here. But start with the ram. That's critical to windows running right. Good Luck, |
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