Vista - increased RAM -- but sometimes performance is worse

I increased the RAM on my Compaq Presario SR2002X from 512M to 2G (both old
and new are the same speed, PC2-4200). Both the BIOS Setup and the System
dialog in the Control Panel show that they are using the new memory. As
expected, a variety of things run faster now. In particular, all those
security dialogs that come up and dim the desktop whenever you start some
system maintenance process. They used to be slow to appear, but now they
pop up almost immediately. Some programs start faster now -- the MSDN
library displays almost immediately now, and it used to take about 30
seconds to initialize.

The surprise is that some things run slower. One thing that is particularly
noticeable often occurs when entering text into a web page input area. With
each keystroke, I can see the caret moving across the white background, but
no characters appear. Sometimes I'll type in five or six keystrokes before
it gets around to painting the characters behind the cursor. Another occurs
with crossword puzzles displayed in Flash objects, such as the one in the
daily L.A. Times. For these crossword puzzles, first you have to poke a
puzzle-selection button; then it pops up a dialog with a choice of "regular"
or "master" skill level. The pop-up used to display instantly; now there's
a delay of about three seconds.

Why would some things run slower after an increase in RAM??

Thanks,
Jeff

When dealing with the internet the amount of RAM nor the speed of your
system has anything to do with it. It all has to do with the speed of your
connection.
In other words if your machine was ten (10) times faster from a hardware
stand point than my machine, if my connection to the internet was
better/faster than yours, I could connect faster and things would display
faster even though your machine was 10 times faster than my machine. Even
that will change for site to site or Server to Server. The only thing you
can do about that is to get /buy more band width.
Locally your system may out perform my machine 10:1 if everything else was
equal.

H Brown

"Jeff" <nomo@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23C7KMvfwJHA.4592@xxxxxx

> The surprise is that some things run slower. One thing that isIt's understandable after adding the ram to think it has something to do
with this behavior, but it seems unlikely. Try running the Windows
Experience Index again - are all the scores reasonable? Since you mentioned
"flash" do you have the latest version? Try the crossword puzzles in a
different browser to see if that makes a difference. Do you see the typing
slowdown in other applications or only the browser? If it's only in the
browser that would suggest a slow internet connection. You can run a
performance test on your internet connection at dslreports.com.