I have a PII 350 with 64M of Ram. Sometimes, lately daily, all of a sudden it gets super slow. Wont even close out a window without struggling. I will close everything...and it will still act dumb. I have Norton's utilities, and I run the System Doctor when it acts like this. It tells me that the CPU usage is at 99 or 100% and my Ram is at like 88%. I end up rebooting and it fixes it for awhile. What could be causing this?? Why is it acting like this?? I am afraid the poor thing is going to blow up....LoL!!! Please give me some suggestions on what it could be and how I could fix this....Thanks in advance!!

Carrie, Hello.... Well....without seeing it it could be tricky. have you got Windows 95/98??? If so....go into control panel, click on the System icon......then click the Performance tab......then click Virtual memory. Make sure that the bullet point is on 'Let Windows manage my virtual memory'. If not.....set this option. Next thing.....how much disk space have you got??? Is there much free??? Windows uses hard disk space if it runs out of your 64Mb of RAM as extra space....if theres no hard disk space left and it runs out of system ram.....your PC will blow up into a million bits and none of the pieces are labelled :) ......only joking....10,000 at the most! If both of these options are OK....let me know and I'll think of something even more perverse for you!! Could be a virus or something running in the background.....we'll have to take it a step at a time......hope this helps. blobby

Do you have Real Audio installed? If so do you have the Real Audio Icon running in your systray? If so ,right click on the icon and choose "disable smart start". there is a known issue with the smart start using up all resources on certain computers.

I guess I didnt explain enough about my system. I am running Win98, windows is managing my virtual memory, I do have my real player...and most everything else...disabled from start up and my systray. I have a 4.4Gig Harddrive that has well over 2Gig free so it has plenty of swap file space. I have also checked and rechecked for viruses. I have Norton's Antivirus but I wondered if maybe that wasnt picking one up so I downloaded the trial for Dr. Solomon's (which is now McAfees). Neither one picked up a virus. It seems to happen either after I run Dreamweaver (webpage builder), PSP, or am surfing the web for awhile without clearing my cache. My main concern is the processor getting maxed out. My Ram is always at at least 55% used....which bothers me too. That is just after a clean boot and closing everything but the explorer with ctrl+alt+del. If you need any other information to help I appreciate it!! Thanks alot!!!

You've done a great job at narrowing the problem down. As of now, it seems you've done everything possible in WINDOWS. Now, pay very close attention to your computer's start-up. Watch for any unusual processes occuring while the boot-up proccess occurrs. Next, boot up in safe mode and see if all your resources are used up there as well. If everything is fine there, than it is probably some driver thats giving you trouble. If this doesn't solve it, boot into BIOS and fiddle around there to see if you find anything unusual.

Hi, Go to Start | Run | msconfig | Startup. The list of checked boxes you see is all programs and applications running in the background from boot on, and they are using your resources. You gain resources by unchecking the boxes which are safe to uncheck. Keep System Tray and Scan Registry. Keep entries related to H-P hardware. Other than that, it's up to you what is set to launch from your taskbar, and what you feel you can do without from there. If you have questions about any of the boxes,post a list of the questionable items, and someone here can help you decide what they are and what to do with them. Good luck, KYain

You might also wanna try out this free program called " cacheman " especially handy when you have a lot of resources being used up by programs.It runs on win95 as well as on win98 systems.