Memory "Hard Faults" - what's that?

dellfanatic

Does anyone know what "Hard Faults/sec" are and why they can be so high on my system? It's being slow lately and even doing somethings imple like pausing my music takes about 10 secs to action after I press the keyboard hotkey.

ANy advice appreciated, thanks!

Chippy_Minton

From Identify Resource Usage in Resource View:

A hard fault (also known as a page fault) occurs when the page of the referenced address is no longer in physical memory and has been swapped out or is available from a backing file on disk. It is not an error. However, a high number of hard faults may explain the slow response time of an application if it must continually read data back from disk rather than from physical memory.

A high hard fault rate basically means you have insufficient RAM for the processes running. Either fit more RAM or close applications/processes. If you are actively using an application which uses lots of memory (e.g. graphics/video editing of large files), close any other applications which may be running. Also see whether there are any unnecessary startup processes and services which can be disabled.

dellfanatic

Chippy_Minton wrote: »

From Identify Resource Usage in Resource View:
A high hard fault rate basically means you have insufficient RAM for the processes running. Either fit more RAM or close applications/processes. If you are actively using an application which uses lots of memory (e.g. graphics/video editing of large files), close any other applications which may be running. Also see whether there are any unnecessary startup processes and services which can be disabled.

Thanks for that - at the moment the sidebar advises 62% memory usage... I notice though that the PC can be slow if for example I have MS Word open, media player, internet explorer and excel. If I installed an extra 1GB of ram (4 slots at present, 2 x 512MB sticks installed) would that help significantly?

Chippy_Minton

2 GB RAM should certainly help, however I would think 1 GB should be sufficient for what you are running. Are the Word or Excel files big? How many IE tabs are open?

Defragging the hard drive should help a little bit. The defragger may also show whether the page file is fragmented and if it is you will need to defrag that also, however I don't think the normal Vista defragmenter can do that.