Changing computers 1 Gig at a time

Recently, my younger sister was able to get funding for a RAM upgrade of
her Dell desktop. I found out it can run faster RAM than was in it when
they bought it years ago. Maybe in 2004 256MB was plenty, but not
anymore.

Here's the interesting bits. The RAM in it was DDR PC2700 2x128 Dual
Channel. Dell put in the cheapest, slowest RAM the motherboard would
support.

In it now is 1 kit of 2x1Gig, 512MB per slot at DDR PC3200 Dual Channel.
And the motherboard has another pair of slots for more RAM, up to a max
of 4Gigs. The Latency and voltage were indicated on Kingston's stickers
as 3 and 2.6, but after checking online, the motherboard will adjust
automatically since there's no BIOS setting for RAM voltage.

I fired that thing up and it really cooks. My Bro in law had some
friends over playing some CCG and I can tell a noob now. One guy asked
if it had been defragmented lately, and my bro in law said it had been,
and I was quick to point out that defragmenting does only so much, but
the real speed boost is in more RAM, not to forget faster Dual Channel
RAM.

From clicking on a user's account icon to hearing the welcome sound is a
mere 59 seconds. Less if you just log off from one user to another.
Google Earth pops into memory. I had some minor things to clear out. An
updated Spybot S&D took around 49 minutes to do a 1.2 million item scan.
That's pretty Fast! Did I forget to mention I had VLC play a couple of
saved video clips at the same time as the scan went on - with no
jerkiness?

I found a few annoyances to clear out. On my Bro In Law's side of the
system, I had to remove a few toolbars that crept into Firefox for some
reason. Also had to delete Yahoo! cookies so that they could log into
Yahoo! mail successfully. Somehow a cookie got blocked, and I fixed
that.

Then there was some bullcrap called Pando Media Booster. It shows up as
a process called PMB.EXE. It kept accessing the net. I don't know what
it's for but after installing Comodo Firewall and seeing what it was
doing, I didn't like what it was doing so I disabled it for now. I don't
know what it's used for but as much as it was doing, it was better to
turn it off and find out later. It may eventually get removed.

I've seen 2 XP systems get some surreptitious install of McAfee Security
Scan. Probably a drive-by install when something else went in. I've
uninstalled both cases since the stuff I've put on those systems takes
care of McAfee's crap that doesn't need to be there at all. Why it
showed up I don't know, but it's not necessary!! Unless it came from a
CDrom in this case, it's probably a trojan. Oy vay. When you have AVG
Free and Spybot S&D as well as Comodo Firewall (as well as some of my
favorite tools), you don't McAfee or Norton anything.

However, I would recommend that you buy a license for AVG when using it
on a business computer. I saw one laptop with the Paid upgrade of AVG
and it's rather nice.