Anyone here Computer Experts?

[Chevy-Art]

What is a cleaner?

It is CCleaner; from the website. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space.

[C-WAY]

Yea you should def. look into buying more RAM if your only running 512. Id at least upgrade to a gig its not that expensive these days. If you have 2 256 sticks in your computer take one out and put the gig in. Youll have over a gig to operate with! If you get a 2 gig stick it gets pricey. Depends on how much you want to throw in. Honestly I wouldnt worry about more than a gig cause of your processor speed.

Have you done msconfig yet?

[567234ta]

also in case you haven't noticed we are all computer experts

[txarkitekt]

Well whooptie freakin doo Ricky. We all could care less.

[Maui4x4]

Ehem your problem I think lies within the 51 processes running along with only 512mb of ram... your basically running out of ram and windows is probably using the hdd as extended ram. Run spybot search and destroy along with malwarebytes and you should be moving towards the right track.

*I have only 26 processes running with a windows page file usage of 342mb. This is a "good/clean" setup I think to aim for.

[Bishop^]

Also everyone should consider looking into this

TweakHound's Super XP Tweaking Guide - Tweak & Optimize XP

I usually reformat about once a year, and the first thing i do is go through this guide and tweak xp. XP is not as big of a RAM hog as VISTA is but you can still squeeze out alot of RAM and speed by doing this guide.

[groebuck]

Putting in 2 gb will give you a huge increase in performance...so I would invest in ram first it is cheap. As others have said 90% is pretty full..if you get the chance after running all the cleaners and anti-virus programs - do a defrag on your hard drive. Until you can get more memory your going to page out to your hard drive so the less it has to search all over it the better you will be. Adding a second hard drive for your data will help too.

My XP laptop has 68 processes running so 51 is not a huge amount.


For antivirus -

AVG (do a google search on AVG Free) - this is THE best anti virus free or pay (and it is free - they have a pay version that adds firewall etc.. you don't need all that).

CCleaner -awesome

Spydoctor - awesome

[Bishop^]

Just run spy bot every once in a while. Defrag once in a while delete your temp files. Clean up some things off the HDD once in while, you should be good to go.

[C-WAY]

Once you get the ram it will speed up lots of processes cause the computer will have more available thought to work with. I upgraded my laptop a while back from 512 to 1Gig+256 (I guess thats like 1280ish ram?) and my internet loaded a lot faster

[Maui4x4]

2 gigs of ram is XP's sweet spot, 3-4 is Vistas.

I also use TuneXP - Free software downloads and reviews - CNET Download.com which speeds up boot/shutdown times and access times a little bit.