Why memory low when says 80% free?

skintmostofthetime

Help I'm using XP home on talktalk which has a speed of about 5.9 but system reeaally slow. Can take 5 minutes to just get to login screen then another 10 to show emails.

Is it MY system or TALKTALK? And how do I find out?
Have defragmented and removed some stuff I never or rarely used but too wary to delete much more. System has already told me twice `virtual memory is low - Windows will.....' but am getting concerned that I should be getting rid of more stuff if it is me slowing it down.

It's easy to say `delete this, this and this' but WHAT is it safe to get rid of - do I just lose only what I remember putting on myself - is there an idiots guide to doing a really good clean up?

HELP :eek:

Idiophreak

If in doubt, the best way's to reformat completely and only put the stuff on that you want.

That said, it does seem like your PC is responsible for the delay and it should be easy enough to check whether your virtual memory's to blame...How much hard disk space do you have free? How large is your page file? If the former 's smaller than the latter it could cause these kinda problems...

superscaper

How much memory do you have? I solved my virtual memory problems pretty easily by upgrading to more RAM. XP doesn't run that well with anything less than 512 MiB.

mascherano

download CCleaner and use it to uninstall anything you dont need, if you do delete something you need you can always go back to previous state using system restore. XP is over-loaded with useless services that are running all the time in the background. google 'disabling XP services' for a walkthru guide- theres lots out there. Also, get rid of real time antivirus protection- they just kill your system stone dead (some people dont agree with doing this). also type msconfig in the 'run' command line and look at what is designated to run on startup- the fewer the better, i have 2 things that auto-start on my PC. check your paging file as suggested above on virtual memory. also, dont use Internet explorer- use something faster like firefox. remove anything AOL related. thats it, easy.

superscaper

mascherano wrote: »

download CCleaner and use it to uninstall anything you dont need, if you do delete something you need you can always go back to previous state using system restore. XP is over-loaded with useless services that are running all the time in the background. google 'disabling XP services' for a walkthru guide- theres lots out there. Also, get rid of real time antivirus protection- they just kill your system stone dead (some people dont agree with doing this). also type msconfig in the 'run' command line and look at what is designated to run on startup- the fewer the better, i have 2 things that auto-start on my PC. check your paging file as suggested above on virtual memory. also, dont use Internet explorer- use something faster like firefox. remove anything AOL related. thats it, easy.

I agree with getting rid of running services but I do have one point that I disagree with (don't worry I'm not going into the whole virus debate). I've found that firefox uses just as much resources (in fact it's usually more) than internet explorer 7. It was one of the main reasons I was happy switching back to IE when 7 came out (I'd been using firefox since beta 0.9 beforehand). Now that both browsers are more equivalent by both having tabs it was easier to compare directly between them. Whether this is a correct generalisation I cannot say but on my system at least (throughout various reinstallations of XP) I found it to be the case.

skintmostofthetime

HAve only just got back - have tried some of these things - others will take me time to get my head round - but thanks a lot.

continentalgal

In addition to what has been said about memory-eating AV programs (Norton being one of the worst) and unnecessary XP background services, a lot of programs register at installation to start up when the system is booted. So they basically waste memory for sitting in wait for the possibility they may be used at some point. In theory, if they're already pre-loaded in the memory cache, they would open quickly, which of course is dumb if 50 programs base their assumptions on the same principle. Especially the 'big ones' are notorious for that, i.e. microsh*ite and adobe.

I've seen ccleaner being mentioned on several occasions, I'm not familiar with this particular utility but it may provide an option to disable programs from starting up with XP. Someone mentioned before to increase the virtual memory which might help, and, like superscaper said, you really need more than 512mb in order to run XP at a decent speed.