Windows XP Pro Slow Computer

[mturbo23]

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After having my computer running ok for many months it has suddenly become slow. It is much slower than before and comes up with an error saying windows is running low on virtual memory.

But i installed 512MB from another computer and it was still just as slow.

There seems to be a lot of hard drive activity nearly all of the time and think this might be a hard drive fault?

Spec: AMD 2000+ XP, 128MB RAM, Radeon 7000 64mb, 40GB HDD running Windows XP Pro

Thanks....


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[dadecamp]

Is your HD full? Can you do a defrag? Virtual memory, also known as your swap file, is on your HD.
Did you just add more memory? If so, you need to increase the size of this swap file to at least 1.5 times the size of your memory. Maybe you have a "fixed" swap file size.

 

[mturbo23]

No i didnt change the swap file size. How do i do that?

I set the virtual memory to be allocated by the computer.

The hard drive has hardly anything on it and have already run a defragment.

 

[agissi]

Thats weird, its acting as if you only had 50MBs of on your hard drive free.

You dont want to set the swap size to a numberal, windows should manage it.

If you can, when your doing nothing, or something lite like surfing the net and it becomes real slow again, ctrl+alt+del, go to the Performance tab, and tell us what the "PF Usage" [PageFile Usage] is at.

 

[dwb412]

Possible repair for slow PC

Assuming you have CURRENT and active virus protection your problem is possibly the casue of spyware/malware on your PC. I suggest that you download and run CWShredder, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware and if needed Grisoft's AVG virus software. All products are free and youcan find links to download under the "Support" section at NetHelp Consulting.

Good Luck,

 

[Gunny]

It looks as if you may be running low on real memory, i.e. RAM, probably because of too many continously running background processes. As a result your applications are having to do a lot of swapping in and out of your virtual memory, i.e. Pagefile, and it is appearing as high disk activity.

Look in Windows Task Manager (ctrl+alt+del) in the bottom left corner and see how many processes you are running just after you boot up. Let us know.

On my laptop PC there are 14 or 15 system processes. And, GoBack, NAV and ZoneAlarm bring that number up to 28 continuosly running processes. My laptop PC works fine with that. If you are running much more than 20 to 30 processes that is probably your problem.