Re: OT: Web runs slow after RAM upgrade

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Norman Bauman wrote:

> (BTW, does anyone know of a good list where Windows problems would be *on*
> topic?)

Hi Norman,

I used to visit the Win forums on Compuserve occasionally, but haven't done so in
years. That service has been in decline for a long time, although I think
non-subscribers have been able to enter most of their forums free of charge (on the
web) for some time now. Historically, the info there had been at a far higher level
than you would find many other places. Can't vouch for that today, though. Other
than that, Deja News is always worth a search, and there are various newsgroups, if
you don't mind wading through a lot of junk. I'm sure there are also some websites
where free Win advice is dispensed, and I may even have bookmarked a few of them.
The problem is that I have several bookmark files of close to 1/2 meg. each, all of
which feed into a bookmark database that *should be* recompiled a few times per
year, but I have not done this since mid-'02. The next recompile is a major item on
my project list. The result is that zeroing in on what I know to be there can be a
time-consuming pain.

I spend very little time in Windoze, even less of that in '98, so what I can tell
you is going to be limited. To the suggestions above, you can add the possibility
of a query sent to publications like PC Mag., PC World, etc. That would take
longer, but could also be productive.

> Over the weekend I upgraded the memory from 48MB to the maximum, 256MB.
> Ever since then, my computer has been running very slow (or freezing
> completely) on my dialup connection to the Internet, in all my programs.
> . . .
> This just started after I upgraded the memory. I called Crucial tech
> support, and the technician said he had never heard of this happening
> before.

I haven't heard of anything like this either. The memory itself being responsible
sounds kind of far-fetched to me.

> He thought it sounded like some kind of resource conflict.

> There might be an IRQ conflict.

It's possible.

> The Crucial tech suggested that I check Device Manager for conflicts. I did
> and I couldn't find any.
>
> In System Information, in Hardware Resources, I found the following, under
> Conflicts/Sharing, I/O, IRQs, Memory, and Modem:

In my experience, this avenue is pretty worthless, at least under NT-4 and later
versions. (Don't know about W98.) The reason being that Win does not give us any
useful info. According to the Device Mgr. in W2K -- back when I still had working,
bootable W2K partitions -- *every * device in my system was assigned to a couple of
IRQs. Now I know that there is IRQ-sharing going on, but this is flat out
impossible ! And yet, all of the devices worked, and there were no discernible
conflicts. Just what was *really* going on there under the hood, heaven only
knows. If I wanted to get some halfway plausible idea of which device was taking
which IRQ, I would boot real DOS and use some decent DOS-based system reporting
tool. It might or might not apply to Win, but I could find the results a lot more
believable.

You might try reseating &/or swapping the memory stick | memory slots arrangement.
You might have to play musical PCI slots for your expansion cards, one-by-one, per
some priority that makes sense to you. (Obviously, you can't do without the video
card at any point, but something like a sound card can be optional, while you are
trouble-shooting.) If you are not comfortable fiddling with such things, find
someone who is. These are things I would try. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Jordan