RAM running at wrong clock speed

[24seven]

Hey folks,

I've had a HP TC4200 for some years now. A couple of years ago I upgraded the ram from the original 512 to the max 2gb, but found it was running slower afterwards. At the time I was a little naive and didn't know much better, but now it seems to be that the RAM chips are running at a reported 266mhz in CPU-Z instead of the 533mhz they're supposed to according to the original packaging. There's nothing obvious in the BIOS that will change this, and now that I'm using the machine for university work, I'd like it to run at it's best. Any advice?

 

[Deleted member 217926]

The RAM is DDR = double data rate. So 266 x 2 = 533. Your RAM is running fine. CPU-Z always reports that way.

 

[24seven]

Ok, thanks. Could there be any other reason why it may be so much slower than it was previously?

 

[Deleted member 217926]

I don't know. That is a pretty old device at this point. Was it around the same time as one of the service packs came out for XP? Or did you add a different anti virus suite around then? Either of those things could have overwhelmed the relatively slow hardware. More RAM would not make anything faster but should have improved the ability to multitask.

 

[smorizio]

i would check windows swap file. see what it set for. if it turned off or set to low. With old pc it good to run ccleaner to removed a lot of old temp files. also run defrag on your pc. if the swap file is all over the drive have windows remove it and make a new one after you defrag the hard drive. also look to see what starting up when you boot the pc. a lot of junk software loves to load at start up that going to eat up your ram. (flash/google/apple update. use msconfig and look what in the start up tab. all you need at start up is your anti virus software.

 

[hwangchan]

Ok, thanks. Could there be any other reason why it may be so much slower than it was previously?

surprized to hear its actually slower.. it should at least be faster starting up. I would check task manager and see how much is being used / recognized as a start. If the system is seeing the full 2GB it is likely a software issue.

 

[24seven]

It's recently had a full re-install of Windows XP. Literally, as soon as I changed the RAM, it was slower on the next boot. I remember now actually that changing back to the original specification it was still slow. It used to boot up to the desktop quite quickly when it was new. The fan on it also started behaving oddly as well. Occasionally it will hesitate on starting up applications or under high load when browsing image heavy pages, the fan will kick into 100% for a couple of seconds, then it will slow back down and the page/app will carry on loading.