Occasionally the system needs to be rebooted because of memory leaks and other things that cause a generally slower performance… so you need to ‘freshen up’ the system by rebooting.
Well, logging in and out of win2k seems to have the same effect, and is a lot faster.
So am I missing anything, as far as making the system less ‘groggy’ by logging in and out instead of rebooting?
Logging out does not stop the system processes and any memory problems that may have come out at the system level.
Looks like all of your problems aren’t occuring that deep in the system though.
Ah, that makes sense.
But if I’m getting lagged up because of program memory leaks and stuff, it’ll fix that as well as a reboot?
AFAIK there are no memory leaks in win 2k(unlike ME). It’s probably a program you have running that is causing your slow down. I’ve been running win 2k/XP forever it seems. I’ve never needed to reboot (or relogin) for slowdown reasons. When they are running good, months go by without a reboot. Find out what is slowing you down using task manager and kill it. Should be no reason to reboot win 2k on a regular basis.
dead0man
Actually, although Win2k is much better at memory leak handling, it can still have them. For example, sometimes the task manager will only list about 100 meg of ram being used, but the meter will read 250+/600 meg. Which, I think, can only be explained by memory leaks.
Is it possible that the meter is reading the Physical Memory + Swap File usage? Do you have 600+ MB of RAM on the computer?
I’ve been running XP Pro since October, and all my numbers still add up. It’s been pretty good to me about that, much better than Win 9x.
It’s calculating the swap file size in the ‘max possible ram’ size.
I have 256 megs, and a ~400 meg swap file, so it says X/650 meg of ram used.
But that X sometimes gets to be 250 or so even though I’m only running 100 meg’s worth of programs. And that’s, as far as I know, all physical memory that’s lost to leaks.
Bring up task manager and go to the “processes” view. Under the view menu, choose “select columns” and put a checkmark by the “VM Size” column (this is from memory, so it might be slightly different wording). Click ok and sort by this column. This will show you the processes which are chewing up large chunks of VM. If it’s a system process that’s the culprit, you may have to reboot in order to reclaim that memory, but that doesn’t seem likely. It’s probably a user process which is leaky, and you can kill it in order to get the memory back.
And the “killing a process can cause system instability” warning is mostly scare tactics to keep you from killing system processes willy-nilly. You can kill most user-level processes without any adverse effects.
Oh, and to clarify further, when you log out and log back in, all your user processes from that session are shut down and restarted, which is why you get the memory back. I very much prefer to locate the particular process which is misbehaving and punish it, rather than have to close all programs and log out.
Uh, and to clarify even further, I didn’t mean to say that all your user processes are shut down and then restarted when you log out and back in…I meant to say that they’re all shut down when you log out, and all the normal ones (explorer, system tray, etc) are started fresh). Didn’t mean to make it sound like you’d have a snapshot of where you were before. I’m sure you knew that…just correcting myself for the sake of not being misleading.