memory drain

**stewsy** · 8th December 2004

Went up to my mother-in-laws last night to have a look at her computer as she says it is running slow. When I had a look I noticed that she had a memory meter on and it was showing 17% free and the computer wasn't doing anything. The PC is a Pentium 4 2.2 with a 256 mb ram. Is there any reason for this as she is really struggling to open programmes etc

**Possy_99** · 8th December 2004

I'd suggest a scan of the computer for spyware/viri, and get rid of that memory manager, cos that went help performance much

**bignes_420** · 8th December 2004

had a call about that yesterday, running between 54%-80%

tried going to selective startup, and disabling the system services and startup items
worked fine like that.

Possibly a virus!!

**Possy_99** · 9th December 2004

obviously don't go in there disabling stuff left right an centre though, or you'll end up having to reinstall windows - customizing system services is quite an advanced thing to do unguided, so if you haven't done this before, best tread with caution...

..I presume your problem probably lies with some spyware. A quick check using the three figered salute (CTRL+ALT+DEL) and going in to processes will give you a list of running processes and an idication of how much memory they are using, this would be far better than runnin a specific merory monitoring program, if you see a program using a huge amount of memory and don't need it open, just click on end process

(assuming your running xp by the way)

**stewsy** · 9th December 2004

Presssed CTRL ALT + DEL I noticed that the system idle process is running at 99%, tried ending it and it will not let me.

**Little John** · 9th December 2004

Originally Posted by stewsy

Presssed CTRL ALT + DEL I noticed that the system idle process is running at 99%, tried ending it and it will not let me.

:|

LMAO

the system idle process running at 99% is good that tells you it is doing nothing

sort the task process list by the amount of memory used and see what is hogging all the memory then sort it by CPU time and see which process is hogging the CPU this will give you somthing to go on.

but as sugested before grab adaware and use it to scan your system for spyware. what ever you do dont clear the quarentine info before you have rebooted the pc a few times without problems.

I hope that helps.