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For the past few months I've been having quite a few memory related issues. My specs then where a 3.0ghz Dual core pentium D processor, 1GB RAM, Geforce 7800GTX 512MB video card and a 600 Watt Power supply. Things where good then. After that my dad went and bought 2 gigs of memory, which he couldn't use. I took it off of him and for the remaining 6 months that I left it in my computer I would get the occasional blue screen. (I removed the old RAM). Most often I would get it while watching flash animation like Youtube but at other times it would just happen out of the blue. I ran hardware diagnostics on all my components and everything came up clear. So now, about 3 weeks ago, I replaced the 2Gigs of memory with two 2gig sticks of corsair gaming memory. Of course, after that all the blue screening stopped but now if I have firefox up, a flash program, or simple minimizing, the computer slows down dramastically. If there is audio playing, (like my zune player) it gets really sluggish. I know the memory isn't bad but I can't quite tell what's causing this system slowdown.

Also, I'm using 32bit Windows XP, knowing full well that 32 bit only picks up 3 gigs but I'm keeping the extra for when I update. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Make sure that 3Gig Max installed only
Run CCleaner
Then a CheckDisk

Manual steps to run Chkdsk from My Computer or Windows Explorer

• Open My Computer, and then right-click the hard disk that you want to check.
• Click Properties, and then click Tools.
• Under Error-checking, click Check Now. A dialog box that shows the Check disk options is displayed

Use one of the following procedures:

• • To run Chkdsk in read-only mode, click Start.
• • To repair errors without scanning the volume for bad sectors, select the Automatically fix file system errors check box, and then click Start. (tick)
• • To repair errors, locate bad sectors, and recover readable information, select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box.

Note If one or more of the files on the hard disk are open, you will receive the following message:
Click Yes to schedule the disk check, and then restart your computer to start the disk check.

Wait until Chkdsk finishes Checking / Repairing any faults
Windows will then either restart your computer or continue loading Normally.

press crtl-alt-del
task manager opens up
processes
how many are running....?

There are only 55 process running. I'm almost certain that it isn't a software related issue. I've run the cleaner and the checkdisk and it hasn't fixed anything. Really not sure what to do from here than to go back to my old memory or just cope with the lag. :/

I have 17 Processes running

You might want to try Startup Control Panel and remove any non-essential startups

press crtl-alt-del
task manager opens up
close the explorer.exe
then ciick file
new task run
and type explorer.exe
if ur cpu is running at 100% load and this fixes the prob temporarily then it seems that you may have corrupt avi file on the computer which the file index service is trying to parser and resolve as in the avi file is missing some ifno an the pc keeps loading it into memory to fill in the blanks
if thats the case you can do some registry mods to stop this
let me know how you go