Video card suggestions wanted

[gpsmikey Profile Private message]

Hmmm - just snooped through all the corners of my BIOS and I didn't find
anything. The fact that the ATI control panel only shows 128 meg makes me
think that is all that is there. Oh well.

mikey

[Hemo2 Profile Private message]

Barbara, it sounds like you're getting some good help. I don't have much to add except the problem you're describing seems the same as I ran into at work the other day. I brought in my Christmas Tree show as an .EXE and one person that viewed it had "extreme" stutter and pauses, while others ran fine. The computers were the same so it didn't make sense. I had one reboot their pc and then not startup all their programs they had running before and then it ran fine. The .EXE shows seem to be somewhat of a resource hog when they're playing, so anything you can do to cut down on the things that are running in the background, the better off your computer will be. There's so much "bloat" and unnecessary programs that get loaded up on computers that it's amazing sometimes that anything runs. I just bought 2 computers for my daughters and they came with so much garbage loading up at first, I couldn't believe how slow they were. Once I removed all that junk, then the computers run fine.

Mikey is right about Norton. Basically some years ago, I'd recommend Norton products to folks that would ask me about it. Today I recommend anything BUT Norton. Norton is one of the more resource hog & inefficient products out there. (The 'corporate' edition of Norton isn't too bad, but that's a different beast.) I personally run just an anti virus product and Windows Defender for spyware. IMHO two of the better anti-virus programs out there are AVG and NOD32, although others are good too. (I use AVG.) There's actually a free version of the AVG product available. The Windows Defender from Microsoft is free and actually not too bad of a product. (Microsoft actually bought this product line when it was known as Giant spyware.) I don't run any firewall software and simply use the built in firewall of Windows. (I do have my computers running behind a Linksys router too.)

Hopefully you can see if there's some unnecessary bloat getting loaded on your computer and trim that down and see if that will help. Let us know how it's going.

Keith

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

Keith, if it's anything fixable, it's going to be all that junk running. One thing being looked into currently is the fact that I have the Media Edition of XP--not that I requested it, by the way. It loads a lot of garbage at startup that I'll never use, not ever. Do I want TV via my computer? I hardly watch regular TV as it is.

Eventually, I hope to be able to boast of a lean, mean, computing machine. Either that, or of how far I can throw a computer.

Barbara