Memory

[Liz65]

Despite having 1GB DDR memory, I find that playing music, and printing, gets interrupted when I perform other simple tasks. On checking, I find I have about 600mb memory free. Surely this can't be right? Would be glad of any help.

[vehelpfulguy]

Could be a slow processor

or a slow hard drive (remember a laptop hard drive is slower than a standard PC hard drive)

If you have two hard disks try moving some of your files the the second hard drive (like mp3 files) so you do not get hard disk contentino on the hard drives.

[Liz65]

Thanks vhg. it's a PC with 1 hard drive. Processor is probably too slow - 1.6ghz

[Aquariel]

1.6 GHz is more than enough to cope with playing mp3s and doing various other tasks.

What other "simple tasks" are you doing?

[divernut]

1Gb will be reduced cos just running windows takes a load. I had same problem, run spybot (free download just search for spybot) and a virus can cause this. Run avg free (free from www.grisoft.com)

also your soundcard has a lot to do with it. dont forget, a farrari with **** tyres will be limited. get a good soundcard that will no doubt help and they are not dear. try all the other stuff first. its free!

[fo3nix]

I'm not sure what drivernut is talking about. Your sound card doesn't do anything to the speed of your computer. However, his suggestion of doing a virus and spyware check is a good one.

What operating system are you running? If you're running XP, then 1.6GHz may be a little slow, but should still be perfectly usable. 1GB RAM is more than enough.

When you say you have 600MB free memory, do you mean your hard drive has 600MB free? If so I agree with vehelpfulguy, try and make some more free space.

[Liz65]

Hard drive has about 62GB free. I have Opti Memory which sits in the system tray and lets me know how much memory is being used. Running XP. Simple tasks include connecting to the internet, browsing thru' and editing graphics files. Very rarely have more than 3 things going at once.

[fo3nix]

editing graphics files with what?

photoshop or a similar type of application will vastly slow your performance down.