Buffalo said:
You either have too many programs running at Startup, a bad program running
or you may have an infestation.
Do a ctrl-alt-del and bring up the 'Task Manager" and select "Processes" and
see what is using your memory.
i have no infestations. this P4 machine is a fresh Win2K install (replacing
the infested XP that came with it) as of a few weeks ago. i had my previous
machine (and this one) on the internet 24/7 and only once did i get a virus,
and that was from opening an attachment that looked like it came from someone
i trusted.
right now, the top 3 memory users are firefox, bearshare, and seti@home at
102M, 73M, and 29M respectively. next is explorer at 5M and then all the
normal windows folderal.
the only non-windows startup stuff is CoolMon, BOINC/seti@home, and roxio
drag-to-disc.
peak commit charge is 556M right now, and that's from looking at some huge
PDFs yesterday and manipulating some large images.
i'm quite familiar with sanitizing windows machines - i get roped into it
constantly by friends and friends-of-friends.
the issue is NOT that the applications i'm running are overusing memory, as
there's usually quite a bit of physical RAM free at all times. it's that
windows decides to unload things from memory for no good reason, and the
problem actually gets worse when there's more physical memory available. i'm
sure there's a point where if you have gigabytes of RAM the problem goes
away, but it seems that the 512M-1.5G memory range is particularly
susceptible to this problem. i never had the problem with a 384M win2k
machine, and my work machine with 2G and XP doesn't have the problem - but
maybe it's super-fast drive and super-fast SATA interface and the fact that
it's under the desk where i can't see the drive light are masking it, as
there are occasional inexplicable 2-5 second hiccups on that machine.