No spyware/adware/virii. Just defragged. No screensaver, fancy graphics, or visual styles (this is WinXP). Hardly ever run more than 2 or 3 programs (e. g., browser/winamp/Word) at once. I have 128 MB of RAM, which is supposedly sufficient for WinXP.
And yet after four or five hours, Eddie the PC starts bitching at me about increasing the paging file, it freezes up and grumbles about doing simple things like scrolling or moving the cursor in Word or a text box - in short, needs some time in the corner.
Are there any RAM-hungry programs I should jettison? I’ve heard Norton AntiVirus uses up a lot of memory. Watching Firefox in the Task Manager, its memory usage tends to increase - though I’m not sure if it increases the longer it runs, or plateaus. Or should I just take Eddie back home for Xmas and get the local nerds to install more RAM? I’d appreciate any advice!
…not to mean that your computer cannot handle more memory. Only that in my opinion, if you’re going to continue to use XP, with more demanding apps, with something like a Pentium 400mhz Celeron, it just isn’t worth it.
If it is bitching about increasing the page file size, that means that you have it set manually for some reason and that is not usually a good idea. Go to Start ---- Control Panel ----- System ------ Advanced ---- Performance Settings and tell Windows to handle things on its own. You need more RAM too.
ding ding ding… there’s your problem right there. I can’t even stand to use the thing without 256. I have found 512 to be more than adequate for most purposes.
Well, you either buy more RAM, or use less of it. XP runs some services, a few of them which are unnecessary piggies that will rarely if ever help you. You can learn how to turn them off, as long as you remember that you turned them off (in case you ever need to turn them on again). A big one is the “system restore service”, many people find that disabling this gives a big performance boost. It’s a very piggy feature that seems highly afflicted with murphy’s law… whenever you want to restore your system, it seems that the last restore image was not recent enough. I don’t know anyone who has ever been able to recover a problem using that service.
Check out www.blackviper.com… this guy has done some research into what services you can turn on and off to get better performance.
Thanks everyone!
It seemed to me that the Microsoft site said 64 MB was the bare minimum, but I guess not. Esp. after quizzing my friends who mostly have 512.
Shagnasty, last time I set it to “system managed size” I had hardly enough memory after rebooting to switch it back to the recommended size (1.5 x RAM) - but I’ll try it again, probably like a klutz I set it to “no paging file”.
NattoGuy, thanks for the link, this could be quite helpful! Also re System Restore: it’s helped me out once or twice (like the bizarre incident when the message text was inexplicably set to Tengwar) but maybe it’s not worth the trouble.
I am having a lot of “sluggishness” issues with my XP Pro system too. I have 256 RAM. The thing was fine for months and months and only started to slow down gradually about a month ago. My comp is apparently virus free and I have defragged.
My question is: if it were only a RAM issue, or an issue where I need to turn some of my XP services off, then wouldn’t my system have always run slowly? Why has it become gradually slower and just now is hardly bearable?
Like everyone else you are gradually adding services and clogging up your machine, drive, registry, etc.
You may for instance have recently installed XP SP2 and thus inherited a firewall involuntarily, which may well be slowing down 'net access, especially if you already have your own firewall as well.
As the others mentioned here before, regard 512mb as the true useable minimum RAM for XP.