From what I understand, you're running a dell dimension desktop with a
700mhz Celeron and 64mb of ram and you are running Windows 2000
Professional.  The cpu speed isn't the the bottleneck here, contrary to what
many people will say, a 700mhz Celeron isn't that slow and should meet most
average user's needs without problems (even video editing and dvd copying
can be done on pc's running with cpu's in the 700mhz to 1ghz range).
However I would bet that 64mb of ram is probably a bare minimum for Windows
2000 professional and that's why the machine "crawls". Memory is cheap these
days so it doesn't make sense to skimp out in this area.  I would increase
the physical ram to 128mb or better yet 256mb (or 512 or 1gb whatever you
can afford) of ram and watch the machine run like a champ afterwards. You
could even entertain a notion of installing winxp pro on this machine after
the ram upgrade and you pc would still perform quite well.  Based on my own
experience at my office I have a few Pentium II 350mhz desktops that run
win2k with 128mb of ram and they're able to perform at decent speeds while
running office xp, internet explorer 6, multiple ibm as400 terminal
emulation sessions, email, while running on a network.  These PII 350
desktops are quite old and if they can run win2k without problems, your pc
can do even better once the ram has been increased.  Another thing to look
for is harddrive space, make sure you have enough space left on the
harddrive for ample page file room and defrag purposes (defragging your
win2k/winxp pc on a regular basis will also help a lot as well).  If you're
running with less than 15% free space on your harddrive, performance will
likely take a nose dive because of this as well.
HTH....rob,wpg

>>>>>Original message:
Subject: Re: slow machine
I can't seem to locate the cache to turn it on. The "custom" DELL bios
does not 'display' the settings as I am normally used to seeing on
'regular' boards. In fact the bios shows very few settings. Is there
another way? This Dell Dimension (Celeron 700) is slower than a P166. I
can't figure out why.
I have tried disabling/ enabling various "cache" types via bios, but
I am not savy on cache. Basically machine crawls. What can I check for?
alter?

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                          http://freepctech.com