Available Physical Memory

[Binoculars]

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?

[TheStormyPetrel]

Binos - I just asked my other half, who dabbles in such things, if he has any ideas. He suggested a couple of things.

1. He likes Spybot better than AdAware, as he thinks it picks up more. See http://www.safer-networking.org/

2. To see what is running on startup, and therefore is slowing the machine down, go to msconfig. To do that go to Start, run, msconfig

3. Try looking in the startup folder. It should be empty or perhaps have office. If it has other junk, it is probably slowing things down.

Good luck :)

[Binoculars]

Thanks Stormy.

Running the Msconfig Startup was one of the first things I did, and I was horrified to see the number of things on there, but I learned some time ago not to delete things based on guesswork, and I could only isolate a few of them as being genuinely unimportant. The other gobbledegook could have been anything.

Regardless, in the end after everything I did the laptop was running significantly faster and B1 was delighted, so it was probably a combination of everything.

Still curious about that Available Memory thing though.

Cheers,

Binos

[TheStormyPetrel]

Oh dear, I shouldn't have dabbled in things of which I know little. Sorry if the stuff I mentioned was obvious to you - I guess not knowing how much you knew about computers already meant I told you stuff you already knew. Oops, back to JB.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Binoculars,

SODIMMs make great stocking stuffers. ;)

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. A clean install would do wonders if you do not want to get the extra RAM. If the MSCONFIG was full of programs, chances are the registry is now bloated from all the installs and uninstalls.

[Binoculars]

Thanks all. Stormy, in terms of computer knowledge, I'm on about the third rung up a twenty step ladder, which makes me a guru to about 70% of the puter-owning population I've found, whereas in truth I know sweet fanny adams, as my continual questions here would have made obvious. Your hubby is welcome to make any suggestions at any time....err, about computers, that is. ;)

TCS, so I can remove anything from the startup list and know I'm not going to cause any adverse effects? That would certainly be handy to know.

Richard, likewise with the Registry. I use RegCleaner, which is a nice little program, but again I'm reluctant to delete anything if I don't know the RAMifications. (sorry...). And what is a SODIMM? Are you insulting a poor defenceless RAM chip?

Anyway, as advised, laptop is now working fine, raising Dad's credibility no end. 128Mb is, as suggested, a little tight with XP, but B1's requirements are not onerous, mainly music and word processing, and it's usually quite sufficient.

Thanks for all suggestions.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Binoculars,

A SODIMM is the type of RAM Notebooks use.

http://www.mushkin.com/isroot/mushkin/gif/ddrsosdram.gif

As for startup programs, first go to Start >>All Programs >> Startup and delete anything you see in there. (You can leave Microsoft Office if you like.) If it is in there, it is not needed at bootup. You can right click on any of the links in there and delete them without needing to use Windows Explorer to access them.

Next go to the Systray and see what you can disable there. A lot of programs use it as ad space and are not needed in the systray.

Then run MSCONFIG. In the Startup Tab, look at the Command and Location lines on each item in there. It will give you some hints as to what each startup program does. You can disable them a couple at a time, reboot the computer, see if anything is adversely affected, if not disable a few more, etc.

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. Yes I was insulting your poor defenceless RAM chip. :p