Re: Memory
eurolarva's tale is why I find them tough to recommend. You can cause more problems than you "fix". The latest versions of Norton Utilities tend to be safe and fairly effective. The two can't live w/o utilities IMHO are Norton Antivirus (or Macafee) and GoBack Deluxe 3.0<br /><br />With computers, if ain't broke don't fix it unless you are doing it for the learning experience and can afford to start over.<br /><br />One other word of caution: Never, ever, ever update your BIOS unless you know exactly what you are doing. If you lose power during the update or accidentally load the wrong update, your system will be unbootable until you physically replace the BIOS IC or maybe even the whole MB.<br /><br />Also, just keep in mind 90% of the time your processor is idle (doing nothing) and a good chunk of your memory on modern systems is empty. So, in some ways, you are trying to optimize a race car then never gets into second gear. Most of the delays you experience are due to your net connection, your video card and your hard drive.<br /><br />If you want a fast system get the fastest video card with the most video memory, a fast hard drive, at least 256MB of RAM and a fast Internet connection and keep the background software running (nasty little poorly written aps like real player, etc) to a minimum.<br /><br />Keep the number of apps that load when you boot to an absolute minimun..
