Curious Problems

Published on March 21, 2011 By kona0197 In Personal Computing

My friend has an aging and old HP computer. The CPU is one of the old 2.8 or 3 GHz Pentium 4 models along with 512 MB of DDR 2700 memory. It also has a SATA hard drive.

The issue is that the PC frezzes up on Facebook while playing flash games. It is connected to the net via WiFi and I have checked out my router settings and the Windows XP settings and the connection seems fine. The PC just seems to freeze no matter what browser we use.

I think the hard drive is on it's last leg. She really does not want a new PC. I thought adding some RAM may help. Any ideas?

Comments (Page 2)

Tydorius

on Mar 22, 2011

You don't have to pay for Norton Ghost. Checkout Clonezilla.

http://clonezilla.org/

Also, if it's still an HP factory model, you can get the hardware drivers from their support and downloads section. I have a netbook that I obtained for coding out of the office, and I just put all the drivers from HP's website onto a DVD so I have them safe.

There's also Driverguide and other places where you can download a driver after viewing a series of advertisements. I've done that too.

Even if it's not strictly factory, you can download the drivers individually so it's not like you have to install drivers for after-factory parts. I suggest ripping them now and putting them on a cd/dvd if you think the hard drive or anything is failing. It'll be easier than having to hunt them down later after something critical fails.

kona0197

on Mar 22, 2011

Downloading drivers is the easy part. I don't have a copy of XP for the machine.

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