It's so slow, do we need more memory? what do we do?

My sister skype today wanting to know if putting a memory card in would make it go faster and what about the stuff on the memory at the moment?

A perfectly phrased sentence that I could either go all IT geek snotty about and start asking her loads of questions that she will not know the answer too, which would make me a complete cock, or I could just help her. It was always going to be the latter, she is my sister and if it was anyone else asking the same question, I would do the same. However I still started to make a few bad suggestions..

• Have you got the motherboard manual?
• Do you know how much RAM you have?
• Do you know how many memory sticks your motheboard will take?

Idiot!! She did tell me it was a HP Pavilion 1430. Forget that sis, can you see My Computer anywhere or do you know where the Control Panel is? Yes, she has XP. So she found a My Computer, I told her to do Right Click and then do Left Click on the properties entry in the menu list that came up.

She then told me how much memory she had, 512MB.

So know we just had to find out what the maximum memory her PC would take, the number of slots and the type of memory. Sod it, sis goto this link crucial Memory (via skype chat) , tick the accept T&C (terms and Conditions) box and press scan my system.

AT this point my sophos antivirus informed me that the downloaded program was suspicious and was a HIPS/FileMod-005. Its at times like this when you need an IT bloke around so I was all prepared to tell my sis to ignore this warning and allow it to run and yes her AntiVirus did the same. Makes you think, how do people ever know what to do or trust. On the sophos website it stated:

If you've received an alert, a detected file is likely to be malicious, but it's up to you to choose whether to trust the file or take other action.

The program scanned her system and came back with what her system had at the moment 2 x 256Mb ddr pc3200 memory sticks and the maximum she could go up to was 2 x 1Gb ddr pc3200 memory sticks. So know she could google for the cheapest ddr pc3200 1Gb memory.

I then told her 3 times, cos each time I was pretty certain she did not see the importance of what I was saying, that she had to earth herself on the case before handling the new or old chips. To be sure she understood I went into total cock geek mode and repeated it until she said, do you think I did not get what you were saying? So I repeated it once more and added the reason why.

• Yes, the old Ram is no good, but save it just in case (I'm a horder)
  
• No there is nothing stored on your old Ram to transfer
• Yes, definately unplug the mains cable before opening computer
• Yes switch/shutdown the computer first
• YES it will run faster, loads faster, but not 4 times faster.
  

Hope this helps.