NOOOOO!!!!!

[bozotheclown338]

My dad has this cd at work to romove everything installed from a computer and my mom wants him to bring it home because our computer is slow, but wouldn't more RAM speed it up? I have so many planes and downloads and games that I don't want ot lose. Does the amount of space on your h-d affect the speed? And one reason my mom complains about it being slow is she only goes online and we have AOL and only 56k connection...     If it is RAM, how much should I have since I only have 127 mb, and how much should cost?

[gw]

127MB!!!  I just got off of a system with 256MB because fs2004 was too slow for my tastes.  Another 256MB was going to cost me about $120 but I decided to put the money toward a new system altogether.

gw

[bozotheclown338]

Yeah I know. Compaq Presario is all I got. We already smashed the keyboard with baseball bats  ;D after it quit working. then we got a new one obviously.

[Tom-boy]

The amount of used disckspace doesn't affect how fast your system runs, only how many apps you have running in the background, how fast your HD is, is it fragemented properly and how much do your hardware+software need juice. 128 MBs sounds awfully little to me but the I've got nearly 1 Gig of it I'd say you should get something like 256-524 MBs at least and close all the apps you don't need, getting rid off start up flash screens and useless desktop icons and buttons. Cleaning the registry and removing unnecessary temp files can noticeably improve performance, or at least it boots your system faster.

[Stratobat]

Spyware, if you have any, can also degrade your system performance

Regards,
Stratobat

[Tom-boy]

Oh, absolutely. Forgot that They sure are a nuisance and personally I'd really like to 'meet' someone designing them. Ouch would be the word.

[Stratobat]

Ad-aware has updates almost daily these days!

Regards,
Stratobat

[Hagar]

The way I read it Bozo is not complaining about slow performance - it's his Mum. Try to make her understand that the speed of her internet connection is not the same as the speed of the PC. AOL on 56k dial-up is not particularly fast as I know only too well. This is determined by your local connection & the ISP itself. Increasing RAM will not improve it & it will be just the same on a more powerful machine. A proper defrag & other regular system maintenance might possibly help make it more efficient.

The free space on your HD is used for the virtual memory. This will affect performance but only if the drive is almost full. All programs require a certain amount of free HD space to run. With the large capacity HDs in use these days I suggest that 1 GB of free space would be the minimum to run something like FS9.

PS. You can free up a lot of HD space manually. Delete all those downloaded zipfiles & images you no longer need. It's surprising what difference this will make but be sure to empty the Recycle Bin afterwards or it won't help. Every time you go online Windows creates Mb of temp files. Deleting these from IE or AOL Internet Options will also free up space but it might make accessing webpages even slower.

[congo]

I can imagine Dad's disk installing yet another memory eating, performance chewing, background running program.

Mum needs a cable connection perhaps. Then think of how fast you can download planes! New Hard Disk! YAY!

128mb

[Iroquois]

You could always go with DSL if your internet is too slow. It's offered through many phone companies and it's twice as fast as dial up. Not as fast as cable though. My internet runs at about 2.5mb per second. About 300kps tranfer rate. Can go over 1mb/s with a download accelerator.

I found a neat site where you can test your connection speed and benchmark it with others.
http://www.dslreports.com/stest

[bm]

What are your other system specs? CPU etc

The speed of the PC does make a huge difference with internet, although perhaps not after the first Gigahertz and 256Mb of RAM.

When my old PC was crashing the whole time we had to take it back to the shop frequently, while it was away we had to revert to the old Dell, 450Mhz 128Mb ram. Browsing broadband on that is sloooooooowwww!

Perhaps a complete reformat would help a bit, no pesky speedup CD!

[Scottler]

Good lord....specs like that, the last thing you need is a CD....unless its shaped like a hammer.

In all seriousness, a CD isn't going to fix your problems.  Take the advice of the folks here.  Pick up some RAM and free up some disk space.  Those two things alone will make a visible improvement.

As for your connection speed, the only things affected by this are online activities, so it's not going to make any difference at all in FS, unless you're flying online.

Without knowing your full system specs, I don't know what is slowing your computer down.  But there's no cure all for a slow computer, as far as software goes.