Motherboard or Memory problem

jedi940

Distinguished
Mar 11, 2007
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I have a computer at work and I am trying to figure out what is causing the problem. It is sooooo SLOOOWWWW!!!

Dell
2.6 ghz
256 mb
40 gb
xp home

I know those specs are not great but it is 100 times slower than it should be. It tooks me literally days to install windows because it kept standing still. Just copying the orginal files took over 12 hours (no exaggeration). My first thought was slow hard drive transfer rates but the more i thought about it, i think it is the memory transfer that is the problem. I started to run memtest to see if it would give errors. After the first hour, the memory was only 35% used. Running it on other computers, it gets to 100% in about 30 seconds or less. However it returned no errors. Could this be a memory stick issue or a motherboard issue? Any thoghts would be great.