Friends PC Spec, needs help.

KristianWaring · 21 Oct 2010 at 09:25

Hi everyone.
As you might know recently I just built my first rig, and my friend is blow away by its performance so after Christmas he is going to build one. But for the mean time he has is OLD computer, now all he wants to do on it is play Wow. He could play it fine a couple of months ago but now he has lag.

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0Ghz
1GB DDR
Radeon X 300 Series 128MB 400MHz
7200rpm 200GB HDD

Not to sure what is Mobo is sorry.
Now these specs are fine for Wow, but he is still getting lag bad. Any Advice on trying to make it a little faster?
Would you say Format, as he has a LOT LOT LOT of crap on it.

Also, he has two sticks of DDR 512mb and from my old computer I had 1 512mb stick, so we thought why not put it in his mobo, now he has 3 sticks of 512mb and it is only picking 2 sticks up, any idea why this is any one?

Kris.

KristianWaring · 21 Oct 2010 at 11:02

jbs · 21 Oct 2010 at 11:16

That pc spec is pretty low, but he is not going to get much of an upgrade hard ware wise for cheap. you will probably see quite an improvement by going dual core, better graphics card and more memory, but even second hand these will not be cheap.

It is probably a socket 939 board and their dual core's are in high demand second hand.
Graphics will probably be still AGP so again you are going to pay a lot of money for upgrades.
Same with DDR memory.

So your friend will be better off saving this money for his new build. Replacing all of the above will be a major chunk out of his budget for a new machine.

As to why it did not pick up the additional memory, first make sure the motherboard does not require the sticks to be added in pairs. Then try and swap it out with one of the existing sticks to see if that will work.

So in order to try and do at least something, clear some junk from his hard drive, then defragment and run a cleaner on the registry. Make sure he does not have any services starting up that he does not need.

However I do not think he will see a big improvement without changing his hardware.

EDIT: One more thing he can try for wow. Google "Latency fix for wow - Registry Hack" and apply the settings. Not sure about now but originally this made quite a difference for a lot of people.

Guardsmon · 21 Oct 2010 at 16:50

Buy a KillerNIC M1 - it will solve all his problems

Snooble · 21 Oct 2010 at 17:00

Yup use the latency fix. He needs to determine whether it's an FPS problem or ping :s lag means internet related slowdowns (AFAIK).

VFM Addict · 21 Oct 2010 at 20:02

Delete everything in his Windows Prefetch directory. The machine will boot up more slowly the first couple of times but after that it will start-up faster. Often things are prefetched and never let go, using up ram / resources.

The best tip I can give is that you read and apply most of the tweaks in the relevant regular (free) edition at the following page. They are the best guides around for getting the most out of a system by opsys tweaking.

See - http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

Cheers,
vfm