I have a question about Dimm memory boards. I bought a computer at garage sale. It is an HP Pentium 4 with a 1.5 Ghz processor, Windows XP. When I got it home I found that it runs much slower than my Pentium 2 with 500 Mhz processor and 256 k of memory that I am currently using. In fact, it takes around 3 minutes to boot up and when it boots up it takes over one minute for all the icons to appear on the screen. The longer I use the computer the slower it gets which makes me suspect insufficient memory. I ran virus and spyware/adware checks with recently updated Symantec and Zonealarm and it is clean of them. I opened it up and found one 256k memory board installed that looks like it may not be the original one that came with the computer. I pulled it out and installed a 512K memory board and the computer refused to boot up with it. I pulled it out and installed two 128K memory boards and it booted up but still slow. I pulled them out and installed a 256K memory board and it booted up a little faster but still very slow. I noticed that several of the spare Dimm memory boards that I have have labels on them that tell the size, such as 128K, 256K, etc., but some also say "100 Mhz", "150 Mhz", etc. Does the 100 and 150 Mhz matter? Is it okay to mix/mismatch the 100 & 150 Mhz memory boards in the computer? Also, some of my Dimm boards say "Dell", some say "HP", and some are off brands. Does that matter? I tried to run the XP version of scandisk and it says that it cannot check the disk because the drive or a program has exclusive use of the drive. I wonder if that is due to the memory boards. Thanks for helping out on this.
