anyone else having recent problems with computer slowing down & virtual memory low alerts on a new hardrive?

Question

just had a new 200gb hard drive & a 1 gb ram installed in an atholon-xp laptop this past week. it was working great with great speed etc. all my programs aren't even installed yet & it started slowing down or simply not responding . also getting alert messages of virtual memory low , which is impossible. i've heard other similar complaints and am curious if this is a widespread problem occuring.

Answer 1

I believe it could be an unidentified virus or memory leak in a program.

I too have been fighting 2 laptops at home and 8 PC's at the office which have had the same exact problem which all occured within 3 days of each other. What is in common is all are on a network which a trojan could have passed our firewall and followed the network over those 3 days.

I recieved messages which say "Hard Error" which resulted in my having to reformat. Having felt I truely had a problem which Norton AV, Adaware, Disk Doctor, Zonelabs AV and Spyware, AVG, and several other Antivirus and Antispyware programs could not identify, I scrubbed both my cmos http://freepctech.com/pc/002/files001.shtml#KillCMOS and Hard Drive using KillDisk http://www.download.com/Active-Kill-Disk-Hard-Drive-Eraser/3000-2092_4-10188745.html?tag=lst-0-1 to clean the system. You will need a bootable CD or Floppy and although bootdisk.com use to be a great site for this, they now charge. Here you can find these and better boot and utility disks downloadable FREE at http://freepctech.com/pc/002/files010.shtml .

There isn't much better cleaning than this however, after doing so I got rid of the bogus hard error but with nothing more than a few programs most all of us use all updated with the latest files from MS Update, such as Windows XP, MS Office 2007 (not even the entire system was installed), Zone Alarm Security Suite, Adaware, and roboform installed, I kept it simple to see if it would occur again.

Yes, it did and slowly hit one after another computer over a period of a month.

Okay, so brand new 400gig hard drives were installed, and 1-2 gigabite Turbo Ram chips per system thinking a nice boost may help and they have, my systems still look like they are rolling back to something there again. In my office, I even put a brand new power computer and that has been hit too.

I'm very knowledgeable with tweaking my systems and building systems so after months of work, I feel one of these programs which you may have one or more of the same are holding some sort of memory leak or an unidentified virus is out there right now which AV's have not yet picked up on.

Rebooting always fixes the problem. Use Ctrl + Alt + Delete and check system processes in safe mode. If it runs clean, copy those files and do it again in normal mode. If there are any programs sucking memory significantly, it will show compaired to that in safe mode. Also, check your CPU useage. I noticed my CPU's when having problems were maxing out at 100% even when all task bar items were disabled and no programs were running. Again, a reboot reset this problem but what an issue and problem to have to deal with.

My CPU's are all Pentium 3 at bare minimum or higher so it's not that any of my equipment is outdated.

I believe there truely is something out there not yet identified. Hope this information even though may not be a solution helps identify this problem amoungst the community.

Take care,
Mike

Answer 2

Hi there, Your computer should run OK with 512 megs of RAM. More RAM would be better of course. It will slow down somewhat if you are photo editing or editing music files or video files. I have Win XP (SP-3) with networking and antivirus am only running 27 services. My system had 512 megs for quite a ong time but a year ago I added another 128 megs of RAM. Not a whole lot of change. For info about which services you can safely disable or set ot "Manual" see the first link below for a guide. I believe you can help your speed a lot by removing all the temp and junk files from your system. See link below for CCleaner which will safely remove all the "trash". I run it every day. I also use Glary Utilities to help clean up the registry and "trash files". I run it every day also. link below. Another thing to do that probably will help is to defrag your hard drive. You can use the built-in defrag application or download and run "Smart Defrag" (it's a little faster). If you do the above I believe you will be pleasantly surprised at the improvement. Al

Answer 3

I doubt it is a widespread problem. Most likely it is an improper setting on your computer or as someone else suggested, it could be that some program is hogging resources. I would first check to see if it is an improper setting.

click start-->right click my computer-->click properties-->click advanced tab-->click settings in the performance area-->click advanced tab-->click change in the virtual memory area-->click on "system managed size" radio button-->click ok-->click apply on all windows and then ok to close them-->reboot computer to apply changes

If the "system managed size" was already clicked then you may have other problems. In that case scan your computer with Kaspersky online scanner using Internet Explorer.
http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner

If nothing is found then you have a program running on your computer that has a bad memory leak.(poorly written/created software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_leak
You can identify a program with memory leakage by opening up task manger CTRL+ALT+DEL. Click processes tab and look at Mem Usage on the far right. The one with the highest number of Kilobytes used is the culprit. Write down the name of it and then click on it. Click end task. Do a google search on the name you wrote down. Identify the program responsible for it and then uninstall that program to remove the problem.

Answer 4

If your new hard drive replaced an older one instead of being added as a second drive, you may need to recreate your Windows paging file- check the virtual memory settings by right clicking on "My Computer", then choosing advanced/performance.

But the most likely culprit is some form of adware or spyware-do a complete scan using Ad-aware SE and whatever anti-virus software you currently have installed.

Answer 5

I think you have some kind of TSR, or background program running that is sucking up all available memory and power. Could be a virus.

Do a Ctrl-Alt-Del, and bring up the Task Manager. Look under the processes tab and see if a particular program is eating up the resources. Stop that process, then find the program and delete it.

Answer 6

First, restart pc in safe mode by pressing F8 key once a second when computer is starting up. Run disk cleanup, defrag and scan for spyware and virus. Also I'd run a checkdisk. If you have windows vista I'm recommending to my customers to run 2 gig of RAM.
Thanks, hope this helps,
Henry