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I wonder if some technically gifted individual could offer advice on my PC, it is driving me insane.

I run a Windows XP Pro SP2 machine with AMD3200+ chip and 1GB memory, my machine runs quite a lot of data intnesive programs, stock market , real time data, which i wouldn't think would task it too much.

Anyway after 5 days or so of uptime the machine gets slower and slower and for the life of me , i can not think why?

The page file always gets very large and is currently at over 1.6gb, i have the maximum set at 5GB as Windows once needed to up the limit of 3GB i had applied.

THe only thing i have noticed is that when i activate a minimised screen , the disk light always flashes furiously for a while.

I have been told i either have slow disks, but they are 7200 with decent cache or not enough memory, but i thought 1GB should be ample.

PLease can someone offer advice,

Hi Shjorgs, welcome to phcf.
It seems all those programs eat up your memory and don't 'return' any unused memory. The optimum pagefile setting is 1x your amount of ram for the minum and 1.5/2x your ammount for the maximum. Most other settings will only decrease performance.
How many programs are running constantly and how much memory do they take? (press ctrl-alt-del to view the taksmanager/processviewer)

Hello and welcome to PCHF shorgs.

This sounds like it is due to the RAM in your system. As you say it works fine for a couple of days but after five days there is that problem.
So whats probably happening is that your RAM is filling up day after day and gets to a point were it is so full that is slows you system up.
Hence the reason if you restart the machine will be up to 'light' speed again.

It is possible that adding more ram could help to resolve this but then it is possible that after 10 days it will slow down.

Desktop machines aren't really designed to be on all day and to be running these data intensive programs continuosly.

Do you need to have the machine on all the time or can you restart it from time to time?

Thanks guys...

kaspersky antivirus and outpost firewalll have the most page faults and one instance of iexplore.exe (i usually have 7 instances of iexlorer running all the time to keep tabs on variouis sites) actually uses 106,028k of memory.

One thing that maybe won't surprise you guys is that the slowest time of all is when i ahve to use a stockmarket program that uses Java within internet explorer (SUN Java is really **** compared to the old MS version, it's so slow), things slow down massively when this comes into play, but speed up again when i close it down.

Would it be fair to say then , in summation;

that i need to

1... Decrease my PAGE FILe maximum size

2... stay away from Java used within Internet explorer wherever and whenever possible.

3.. Get more physical RAM?

I definitely don't have any spyware or viruses as i try to be very security conscious, so i thought it may be a hardware bottleneck or something.

Any other advice anyone is preffered to offer would be greatly appreciated.


thank you all for the help.

By the sound of it i'd say 1 and 3 ,yes.

I think you don't have enough memory for what you want it all to do , and a page file of 5gb is way to much. 1/1.5 gb max should be enough.

I totally agree joe :-)

thanks again for your help.

OI should also add... that my board and processor are 64 bit...and the memory i am using is PC2700.... i suspect this is somewhat of a sin too and i should use PC3200>....

Will oit make a lot of difference using 1gb of pC3200 instead of 1GB of PC2700?

thanks.