Hello from Aunty Jack,
As is my habit, I have gone back to my genuine XP Home setup after trying many OS's.
Hmmm, seemed a little slow (well probably subjective anyway). Look at the BIOS settings and did a bit of, "search engines are your friend". The AGP Aperture on most old DELL machines is set at a default of 128 Mb. (you can find this setting under the memory tab).
Having a standard (sub-standard really) Intel 82865G graphics chip on board it does not need 128 Mb set aside for it to give brilliant performance. Reduce the AGP Aperture RAM to 64 Mb. Restart and see the difference in general response. Loading times for programs, loading times for web site, etc. Amazing.
I tried to test the new setup to destruction (well, freeze anyway) with Microsoft Flight Simulator FS 2004 (very resource hungry indeed as my FS setup is about 8 Gb and most options set to medium or high). Perfect, smooth, good frame rates, all from a 3 Ghz processor and 1 Gb RAM.
If anyone uses an old DELL with the on board graphics chip set have a play with the AGP Aperture size by reducing it. I would not recommend taking the size down to 32 Mb though. 64 Mb seems perfect.
Good luck playing around.
Cheers from Aunty Jack.
As is my habit, I have gone back to my genuine XP Home setup after trying many OS's.
Hmmm, seemed a little slow (well probably subjective anyway). Look at the BIOS settings and did a bit of, "search engines are your friend". The AGP Aperture on most old DELL machines is set at a default of 128 Mb. (you can find this setting under the memory tab).
Having a standard (sub-standard really) Intel 82865G graphics chip on board it does not need 128 Mb set aside for it to give brilliant performance. Reduce the AGP Aperture RAM to 64 Mb. Restart and see the difference in general response. Loading times for programs, loading times for web site, etc. Amazing.
I tried to test the new setup to destruction (well, freeze anyway) with Microsoft Flight Simulator FS 2004 (very resource hungry indeed as my FS setup is about 8 Gb and most options set to medium or high). Perfect, smooth, good frame rates, all from a 3 Ghz processor and 1 Gb RAM.
If anyone uses an old DELL with the on board graphics chip set have a play with the AGP Aperture size by reducing it. I would not recommend taking the size down to 32 Mb though. 64 Mb seems perfect.
Good luck playing around.
Cheers from Aunty Jack.
