I've tried everything to speed up this PC that my gf has. Reformatting, changing hardware PCI slots, etc etc. It had a 2.7ghz celeron in it and as we know, the celerys L2 is only 128k, 256 if you're lucky. Thinking this was the problem, I upgraded (or downgraded, depends on what you're counting) to a 1.8ghz p4 w/ a 512 cache(and yes, it's enabled). I'm not too knowledgable about memory so maybe that's the issue, I used to only deal with SDRAM and considering I've never had a DDR computer, this is somewhat new to me. So can anyone give me any advice, anything to look at or for, possibly in the BIOS or something along those lines(aside from spyware and viruses and such) or some program that could get into the nitty gritty and figure out what it is that's causing it to be so slow. Explorer.exe uses %100 CPU quite frequently when I'm opening an IE window, or merely switching windows, and sometimes when it seems like nothing at all is happening. My AMD 1700 with 512SDRAM runs much faster than this. Any help is welcome and appreciated, thanks!

Well,
I think the memory might be an issue. Are you running any antivirus and stuff like NOrton? If you do, then you need more ram. Go to www.crucial.com and download their software, to help you to find what kind of memory you need, then you can just buy it.
I upgraded on my brothers laptop, 1GHZ Pentium 3, 128mb to 768 MB ram and it runs very good, even faster that some of these new PCs.
Any questions?

Hope this is helpful...

Killer

Lider

I have 768 in this, pc3200(as stated at top). Don't know that I'd use more than that. Motherboard may not support RAM that high, but I think it does. Maybe that's a problem?

You have enough memory and the motherboard should be able to handle it even if it's too fast.
It sounds like you have spyware running.
Have you tried a different login to see if there is any improvement? How much available space is there on the hard drive?

I think you have enough memory in that case. Swap the DIMMs in one at a time. Check the general performance in windows and check the memory with MemTest86 each time.

I just noticed something, the RAM is pc3200 but the damned mobo doesn't support ram that high, only supports 2700! Is that a concern, will that bottleneck performance more than just slower ram? If so, how can I fix it, should I disable SPD and manually slow down my RAM?

According to the SOYO website, you CAN use PC3200 (DDR400) RAM:

"Three DDR 2.5V DIMM sockets support up to 3GB (DDR 266, 2GB for DDR 333/400)
184-pin PC3200/PC2700/PC2100 non-ECC, unbuffered DDR SDRAM memory"

http://www.soyousa.com/products/proddesc.php?id=187

Your board doesn't appear to support dual channel mode, but if you have a P4 1.8GHz/400FSB CPU (clocked at 18 x 100MHz), your PC3200 RAM should be running at 200MHz (DDR400) - if it's setup this way, your system is in balance. PC2100 or PC2700 would bottleneck the system.

So you completely formatted the HDD, did a fresh install of WinXP & performance didn't improve over the way it was before the format? Did you install the latest versions of all the drivers, especially the VIA chipset drivers?

http://www.soyousa.com/downloads/selectresults.php?language=&col3=Driver&col2=187

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=2

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8.5 x 200MHz
768MB PC3200
Asus A9550 128MB/128-bit
Gamer Edition
WinME/WinXP Pro

Yep, latest drivers are installed, tried installing the BETA bios last nite but either my disk was bad or something, so I couldn't upgrade and my BIOS failed, so I had to restore my BIOS. Odd that it says you can run 3200, doesn't say it supports it in the manual. Drive(s) have been formatted several times, no luck. Don't know if it's dual channel, I don't know DDR very well yet. WCPUID says system bus is 399.32 QDR(quad data rate?) Aida32 says: PC3200 DDR SDRAM,unbuffered, highest CAS is 2.5 (5 ns @ 200mhz.) Any other info I can provide to possibly help with my problem?