Hi: can anyone help me figure out this reoccuring problem. Right now the message has not shown up. But when the internal harddrive starts getting louder (almost like a motor making more noise) eventually I start getting pages load real slow to the point that each page crawls/loads up the screen from bottom to top or top to bottom at snail speed. I have gone into settings for the virtual memory and changed the numbers to try and trick the system into thinking it has more virtual memory as i read somewhere to do to try and help. This only lasts for a while, eventually it gets to this point again. Is there anything else wrong?? Thanks for any replies..

You need to decrease the load on the physical memory available to your system, so it doesn't have to use as much virutal memory. When the problem occurs, check out your task manager by hitting ctrl+alt+delete. Look under 'Performance' for 'Physical Memory' -- I'll bet it's somewhere around 5k when the slowness is occuring. The system can never run out of RAM, so it will never go below 4-5K, the OS starts writing out pages of memory to the disk when it fills up -- into 'virtual memory'. This is why it's so slow, HDD access time is measured in milliseconds, while RAM access time is measured in nanoseconds -- so when the system needs something from VM, it will take over 1000 times longer to access it, because it's on the disk. You need to either free up existing RAM, or go buy & install some more RAM into your system. Try freeing up memory by turning off some processes. Take a look in the 'Processes' section of taskmanager, look under 'Mem Usage' -- figure out which ones are taking up the most & turn off any that are not necessary. Google around for the process name to determine what it is & if it's needed by Windows. Disable unnecessary startup items w/ Autoruns or HijackThis. Keep an eye on 'Physical Memory', when it starts to dip below 10k, expect slowness. If you can't free up enough physical memory to handle all the running processes, then just go buy some more RAM. Good luck.

Sounds like your HDD is filling up. What percentage of free space do you have left?

Fist : thanks very much for your reply. I will try this out in task manager and get back when it happens next. Thanks for the help. Jam: thanks very much for your reply. I have 504MB Ram. How do i find out how much %free space i have left? Thanks again.