>My main PC is a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon processor, with 512Mb RAM. This is
>absolutely fine for the usual "Office" type stuff. Web browsing is OK
>(apart from the usual adware rubbish, but I don't know if a mac will be
>better for that). I also do some Audio recording on it, and this works
>fine - albeit rather slow if any post-processing is required. Video
>recording / editing and Photographic work (OM content !) is painfully
>slow, however, and regularly crashes my machine.
There is no reason it should be crashing on you. The micro is a bit slow
for video. I have two machines . . . one is an AMD64 3400+ with 400MHz DDR
and it's blazing fast.
The other is a 1.8 GHz AMD Duron Applebred with 256 MB of 266 MHz
DDR. (The Duron Applebred was a resurrection of the original Duron with
faster core clocking and 266MHz FSB.) Graphics is an ancient nVidia MX400
with 64MB RAM in an AGP 4X slot. Nevertheless, I've done video processing
of TiVo recordings on it. It is noticeably slower than the AMD64 box, but
still gets the job done without crashing (Win XP SP2 with all updates).
There is no reason your Athlon should be crashing on you when dealing with
intensive processing. Ignoring possible O/S issues, there are some
possible hardware causes. Crashing under heavy load is usually indicative
of some clocking parameters in the BIOS being pushed just a bit too hard
(RAM in particular). RAM is not RAM is not RAM; DDR RAM has wait-state
timing beyond basic FSB clock speed, and if that's pushed just a tad too
hard, the machine may work very well until put under heavy processing
load. I've had this happen on several machines I've built up from scratch
. . . and now pay very close attention to all the BIOS clocking, timing and
wait-state settings.
If placed under heavy graphics load (as in displaying it), the graphics
card can make a huge difference. I temporarily put an nVidia FX5700 into
the Duron machine and the difference that made under heavy graphics display
load compared to the MX400 was enormous.
-- John
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