I got a Dell Dimension 5150 that is my movie maker. It has become unreliable due to the fact it slows to a multi minute crawl to do tasks. It spasms playing music with the cpu showing like 3% usage. I have done the memtest with 14 passes which showed my 2 sticks of 512 ram are fine. I have swapped out power supplies and tried different sata cables to no avail. I did a clean install and it still over a period os 10 to 15 minutes slows to a crawl. I have reinstalled the cpu with all new thermal paste. It never picks up speed with the cpu fan and touching the heatsink is just warm. Any pearls of wisdom out there. I don't like my babies acting up.
You need to add some more ram so it isn't so slow. Looks like your system can support up to 4GBs of ram. It will make a big difference. http://www.laptopsetc.net/Article-Dell_Dimension_5150_Specs.shtml
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim5150/en/om/WD846A02.pdf Specifications Processor Processor type Intel® Pentium® 4 5XXX and 6XXX processors with HyperThreading technology NOTE: Not all Pentium 4 processors support Hyper-Threading technology. Level 1 (L1) cache 16 KB Level 2 (L2) cache 1 MB for Pentium 5XXX processors 2 MB for Pentium 6XXX processors (depending on your computer configuration) pipelined-burst, eight-way set associative, write-back SRAM Memory Type 400-MHz and 533-MHz DDR2 unbuffered SDRAM Memory connectors four Memory capacities 256 MB, 512 MB, or 1 GB non-ECC Minimum memory 256 MB Maximum memory 4 GB NOTE: See "Addressing Memory With 4-GB Configurations" on page 69 to verify the amount of memory available to the operating system
