Available Physical Memory
Binoette1 has arrived home with her laptop in a sorry state and unuseably slow.
A virus scan found two trojans which have now been deleted and a further scan showed the drive clear of viruses. Anti-virus files up to date.
The temporary internet files and offline content and cookies hadn't been deleted since she left home and were massive. Now deleted.
I ran AdAware and deleted all the files it found, I removed Kazaa and all its associated files and gave her stern warnings about ever using it, and I'm now waiting as it does a Disk Defrag.
Things seem to have improved a little, but I notice in the System Information, the Available Physical Memory is only 34Mb of Total Memory of 128Mb. As a comparison, my own laptop shows Available as 314Mb out of a Total of 512Mb. Is there anything I can do to raise the percentage of Available memory, and is it likely to be a major cause of the slowness? And when I say slow, I mean thirty seconds for a click on the Start button to work and a bit more to open a Word document.
System is an Acer Travelmate 1.3Ghz, 20Gb HDD and 128 Mb RAM running Windows XP. 10Gb available space on the HDD. I know the RAM is marginal, but the system used to work just fine with the same specs; it's not as though it's always been slow.
Any advice appreciated on the memory question, or suggestions for anything else I might have forgotten.
Edited to add I also ran System Restore to October1. If that still doesn't work, should I undo that Restore? Any nasty side effects of that program?
Last edited by Binoculars; 21st December 2003 at 11:29.