Any ideas you boffins?........

[red indian]

.........my puter shows the proccessor barely registering on the "system monitor" but when ever I open just one or two programmes the puter tells me I am "dangerously low in resources". No programmes open the rescource monitor can show as little a %18 system recources free.

Whats wrong? and how can I fix it?

I have run all kinds of anti spyware and anti virus programmes and I have norton on the puter.

 

[TklDuo-Ann]

It seems that when I had that happen once, it was the system in need of defragmenting or something along those lines. If you're running WindowsXP, try pulling up the system doctor and run a diagnostic on it. That should tell you where things are at and let you know what to run to clear things up.

But, don't quote me on that. I'm reallllllly wasted at the moment. But, boy does my back feel better!

Ann

 

[venray]

I think running a defrag will help...I just did that on mine the other day and the ship is sailing much more smoothly.....

 

[red indian]

Thanks Duo and venners.......

........for your words of advice. My puter is spywared,antivirused,defragged to death! but its done no good.

How can i find out whats eating all this memory? sadly I am still running windows ME so I dont think i have this "system doctor" thingy.

i have a thing called "procept" but its so bloody clever I cant make or tail of it!

Right now all i have running is Yahoo and internet explorer and I am down to 17% rescources......what the hell is it???

bear in mind i have 256 mb of RAM which is not all that puny.

 

[Ronley]

If your comp is running windows XP, 256 MB is a little low, but even without enough RAM your computer should automatically compensate with a page file. A page file is a file on your hard drive that it uses in place of RAM when it needs to, much slower, but it works. It sounds like your page file might be too small, or not set to be automatically managed.

I don't know where it is in other OS's anymore, but in XP you can set the page file by right clicking on "my computer", selecting properties, the advanced tab, the settings button under performance, advanced tab in the new window, and at the bottom of that window is the size of your page file, although they call it virtual memory. There's a button there marked change, hit that and another window will pop up. If it's set to no paging file, change it to system managed size, if it's set to system managed size, go ahead and try switching it to custom. If you have plenty of extra hard drive space, I'd say set the initial size to 1000, and set a max size of 2000. That's assuming you can afford to throw away 2 GB of HD space though. If you don't have that much room, try setting it lower. Only downside to that is it'll require some fiddling to figure out how big you actually need it. If you have the extra space, overkill never hurts.

 

[venray]

The only other thing I suggest you do before changing settings is to bring up your task manager (ctl..alt..del) and look under processes to see what might be usig more memory than you think it should.....

 

[red indian]

Thanks ron and venners........

.......I get the ctrl alt del box up but again you reffer to something my puter does not have when you say "look under processes" I just get a list of words that must be worth a hell of a lot in a game of scrabble, but no indication of what they are or how much memory they are using.

Any ideas?

 

[His Divine Shadow]

'Tis because ME doesn't have a task manager. It merely has a thing that lets you close programs, not a display of processes. Try downloading Process Explorer, a free tool from Sysinternals: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html (At the bottom of the page, choose the Windows 9x/ME link). Install it and see what's running. If there are lots of things or it shows your resources being used up almost completely, let me know and I can try to help you kill unneeded/bad processes.