Hello, Using CrucialScan shows my computer to have 256 mb of RAM installed which is what I believe was installed when it was built.
Take a look at this...


What is wrong?
My computer has been slow as well, very slow.
applications like ms office take a very long time to open, also my computer locks up often when two many windows are open. Sometimes opening certain folders take way too long.

It didn't use to be like this, everything wasn't super fast, but I never had problems opening multiple folders.
Whats wrong ?

I wouldn't read too much into that... sometimes XP doesn't display everything 100% correctly. Have you done the basic things? Hardware failure is usually the last thing to rule out. Have you scanned for malware, cleaned out and defragemented your registry, eliminated extraneous boot items, and defragmented your Hard Drive? Those are the key areas to cover when performance is lagging.

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I have 3 gig of ram installed using xp. Some app's such a CCleaner recognize that, others report having 2 gigs, others give me weird variations like 3035 MB. Dunno, I am at the point of not questioning MS and just accepting all the flaws.

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Are you using a built in video card? if yes the 16MB missing on your rig is allocated for your built in video card.

yes I have built in video card. aw man, so thats whats been happening thanks for the help.

also, how much ram would I have to buy so there is a change in the computer performance.

what do you mean by "eliminated extraneous boot items"

I mean keeping unnecessary services and programs from running when you turn on your computer. Having unnecessary/unwanted items running at bootup will slow your PC down when restarting or powering on your PC. You can use third party apps to eliminate unnecessary boot items or use msconfig, a utility built into XP for managing windows services and start items. Here's a guide: Guide to Using MSCONFIG

To open msconfig go to start-->run type msconfig and hit enter. From there follow the guide. If you are unsure which items can be safely disabled from running at startup, download Hijack This and post a log.

Get HJT here:

Merijn.org

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The higher the ram the better performance. Additional 512MB will be fine if you are using MS Office application only. But if you use other application like photoshop I will recommend you to buy 1Gb additional ram.