I have high speed internet access so the computer goes fast most of the time. But some of the time it slows to a crawl. I was told to check system resources and if it was below 70%, to shut the computer down. That caused the percentage to go to the low 70"s. Questions: 1. Is there anyway to prevent having to do this? It's a pain. I can do some things but I am not that knowledgable on the computer. 2. Can I get it above the low 70's? I was told that it should be in the 80's. I have a Compaq Presario with over 320 meg of ram. When I bought it, they said one year of support. But, when I called, they said that support was $59 per call. Any help would be appreciated.
What's your swap file settings? Under the performance tab, there's a virtual memory button. You'll get warnings not to mess with them, but try this. Change the box checked to manage my own virtual memory settings. Then in both boxes underneath, put in 320mb. Also, if your drive is partitioned, you should move it to a partition with very little on it. If not, C works just fine. Click ok or apply and ok and close it. It'll tell you to reboot your computer. Go ahead and do that. That should help some of the problem. Also make sure you run dfrag and scan disk on a regular basis. Some programs have memory leaks. When you run them, they use alot of memory. When you close them, they don't always return the memory. That's why your resources get low. Some times rebooting is the only way to reclaim this memory. If you have anymore questions, you can email me.
jzilla: Thanks for your help. It helped some. I have a Compaq so I suspect a lot of the problem is with them. I have not been impressed with them at all and will not buy another one of their machines. I decided to shut down once or twice a day and that has helped. Just curious. What percentage should I be looking for? I thnk the highest ever has been 75%. Thanks
Mine runs anywhere from 57% to 82%. The 82% is right after rebooting. I use a few leaky programs. By the way, system resources shouldn't have anything to do with how fast your internet connection is, more along the lines of how fast your computer runs while multitasking. Programs running in the background have a lot to do with that too. I bought my kid a Compaq Presario two Xmas's ago. Big pain in the butt. I finally ended up popping the case (voided the warrenty), finding out what was what, reseating everything, downloading all the drivers onto floppy, and fdisking and reformatting the damn thing. It was the only way to get rid of the junk Compaq put on it. I reinstalled Win98se and went from there. I know the performance increased at least 50% after that. Just a thought.
