Hello,
This thread is in response to https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/explorer-exe-ram-problems.185004/
Allow me to digress for a moment; I have no delusions as to why my PC is having issues, it's ancient, it has not had a full OS reinstall in it's life and has certainly sustained some user inflicted damage; as documented in the specs below.
The reason for my posts here, is that I noticed quite a few users having very similar, if not identical issues to myself. The difference is these people appear to be using up-to-date technology and even new versions of windows (Windows 7 Home 64bit is the OS I've seen causing the majority of these similar issues)
As the users that have posted these issues seem to have had no resolution in their requests; I provide the following information to our forums tech gurus as a comparison from someone running a different OS entirely to those whom are having issues.
I am well aware that these issues have been well documented; as a member mentioned, ongoing since around 2004. Perhaps, a more senior member of the forums can analyse these requests and link us to the already resolved threads without the hours of searching that would no doubt be required to find a set of matching circumstances
Running Windows XP SP3 32bit on a system that by today's standards is prehistoric
CPU - Intel Penitum 4 3.0GHZ (which I by accident overheated after disassembling to clean, causing the top of the chip to pretty much fuse to the heatsink... my bad... lol
Mobo - One of those really old transition boards, the ones that were released so you can run either an IDE drive and a SATA drive or two IDE's
Internal HDD - I cannot even remember I think ones a generic IDE 40gb (running the os) and an 80gb seagate SATA (I cannot remember what model)
Ram - Now this is interesting. I was running mismatched ram (3 512mb DDR1's running at 233mhz as reported by speccy... before my speccy died, and 1 gb DDR1 running at 300mhz)
The only ram to survive is the 1gb stick. (joyous -_-)
GPU- ATI Radeon 4600HD 1gb
Sound - Sound Blaster Audigy (7? maybe, suitable for it would appear up to 7.1 surround)
As noted by the user in the aforementioned thread; I too am having issues with windows explorer. The issues began some time ago now so I cannot remember any causal link, anything that I may have done to incite this problem.
Basically, whenever I try and open my computer, or any type of load/save, run type menu, windows explorer basically hangs. It will take about 2-3 minutes to eventually show the contents of my computer (HDD's, optical drives, etc) all the while, steadily increasing CPU usage (as reported by Task manager) to 50%. There will be a continuous increase in pagefile memory usage (described by another user as a staircase).
This usage continues after any explorer windows are closed, and, if the process is not killed; seems to eventually cause BSODs, bugcheck restarts and so forth. Whether the BSOD's and restarts are directly related to this, I do not know. (Shall I try to confirm this if relevant?)
A few programs (Winamp in particular I've noticed) seem to suffer from this same problem, taking a few minutes to load. They do not however, share the same CPU and PF usage issues and seem to run without a problem after the initial load issue.
In conclusion, considering the similarity in issues across different operating system versions that are being posted, is there a likelihood the issues stem from failing hardware rather than OS system errors? If there is an easy fix to this I'd love to hear it!
Thanks for your time.
This thread is in response to https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/explorer-exe-ram-problems.185004/
Allow me to digress for a moment; I have no delusions as to why my PC is having issues, it's ancient, it has not had a full OS reinstall in it's life and has certainly sustained some user inflicted damage; as documented in the specs below.
The reason for my posts here, is that I noticed quite a few users having very similar, if not identical issues to myself. The difference is these people appear to be using up-to-date technology and even new versions of windows (Windows 7 Home 64bit is the OS I've seen causing the majority of these similar issues)
As the users that have posted these issues seem to have had no resolution in their requests; I provide the following information to our forums tech gurus as a comparison from someone running a different OS entirely to those whom are having issues.
I am well aware that these issues have been well documented; as a member mentioned, ongoing since around 2004. Perhaps, a more senior member of the forums can analyse these requests and link us to the already resolved threads without the hours of searching that would no doubt be required to find a set of matching circumstances
Running Windows XP SP3 32bit on a system that by today's standards is prehistoric
CPU - Intel Penitum 4 3.0GHZ (which I by accident overheated after disassembling to clean, causing the top of the chip to pretty much fuse to the heatsink... my bad... lol
Mobo - One of those really old transition boards, the ones that were released so you can run either an IDE drive and a SATA drive or two IDE's
Internal HDD - I cannot even remember I think ones a generic IDE 40gb (running the os) and an 80gb seagate SATA (I cannot remember what model)
Ram - Now this is interesting. I was running mismatched ram (3 512mb DDR1's running at 233mhz as reported by speccy... before my speccy died
, and 1 gb DDR1 running at 300mhz)The only ram to survive is the 1gb stick. (joyous -_-)
GPU- ATI Radeon 4600HD 1gb
Sound - Sound Blaster Audigy (7? maybe, suitable for it would appear up to 7.1 surround)
As noted by the user in the aforementioned thread; I too am having issues with windows explorer. The issues began some time ago now so I cannot remember any causal link, anything that I may have done to incite this problem.
Basically, whenever I try and open my computer, or any type of load/save, run type menu, windows explorer basically hangs. It will take about 2-3 minutes to eventually show the contents of my computer (HDD's, optical drives, etc) all the while, steadily increasing CPU usage (as reported by Task manager) to 50%. There will be a continuous increase in pagefile memory usage (described by another user as a staircase).
This usage continues after any explorer windows are closed, and, if the process is not killed; seems to eventually cause BSODs, bugcheck restarts and so forth. Whether the BSOD's and restarts are directly related to this, I do not know. (Shall I try to confirm this if relevant?)
A few programs (Winamp in particular I've noticed) seem to suffer from this same problem, taking a few minutes to load. They do not however, share the same CPU and PF usage issues and seem to run without a problem after the initial load issue.
In conclusion, considering the similarity in issues across different operating system versions that are being posted, is there a likelihood the issues stem from failing hardware rather than OS system errors? If there is an easy fix to this I'd love to hear it!
Thanks for your time.
