Hard drive thrashing

I have an emachines Celeron 333 - 64 mb ram - 4 gb hd with about 500mb free (recently defraged), Win 98.

The system is constantly thrashing the harddrive - at boot time, when starting up AOL. Explorer, or Quicken - it can take several minutes sometimes just to settle down and stop hitting the harddrive. Would it help if I added a larger drive (40gb) and moved all the programs and data to it, leaving the 'C' drive for the Operating System and not much else? I'm thinking it would have less data to churn thru each time it's trying to do routine stuff (if that's what the thrashing is).

I could also increase RAM if I thought that would help, but I don't know if that makes sense.

Thanks alot.

 

Go here and download startuplist 1.51

http://www.lurkhere.com/~nicefiles/

Then copy and paste your startup list after you unzip and run it.

You may have a lot of stuff running in the background.

 

Hi fogjr

As you only have 64 Mb of ram - some more certainly would help

If you do have a lot of programs running then it is possible the swap file could be working overtime resizing and clicking away - with extra ram and a line inserted into your system.ini file - you could force your computer to use the ram instead of the swapfile.

Using the RAM instead of the swapfile is more efficient anyway

steam

 

I went ahead and added 128mb Ram for a total of 160 - seems to have made a BIG difference. No more thrashing, everything has quieted down. At these prices ($22.00 at Best Buy) , I may as well go up to 256 and be done with it.

Thanks much for the input and suggestions - this is a great resource.

 

Hi fogjr

Going up to 256Mb of RAM certainly wont do any harm on your system - but don't try and go any higher 256Mb is probably your maximum
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