Help! I discovered today my 64mb ram were 100% in use and my system was slow because of this. I closed down every application and it was still 100% used up! I installed 256ram and discovered that 34% of my ram is still in use when only systray and explorer are running but I can't find out where! Someone said it could be a virus... any ideas???

It's your operating system that is using up the memory when nothing else is running.

Windows will grab whatever RAM it can use, so to some extent when you increase it then it will gooble up a large part of it. It broad terms this is not unreasonable. Your system will be faster if it uses RAM rather than virtual memory, which is on your HD and slower, so rightly Windows grabs RAM. All I am saying is that you should not expect RAM to suddenly become free just because you increase it, if this were the case there would not be much point increasing it in the first place. However, your figures do seem to be a tad worrying. Have you checked that there is not some spyware or other that is busy in the background?. Downloading "SpyBot Search & Destroy" or "Ad-Aware" might just find a few things that are running without you realising it. Also run CWShredder and Update your virus scanner and run it. There are lots of things you can do in terms of "housekeeping", clearing TIF's, defragging and so on that will slicken up your machine. In the ultimate W98 needs to be rebooted from time to time to clear memory (it can get a little constipated - LOL). Unless you are a power user 256M of RAM should be plenty. Use the search on these pages to get some tips about improving performance generally. Hopefully you will get some specific ideas about your current situation. Good luck Derek

Also, you need to re-boot occasionally. Windows and some other software doesn't always release memory like it should.

Hello everyone thank you very much indeed for all your comments and suggestions. I will put them into effect immediately. Its interesting about the idea of windows not releasing memory like it should and needing rebooting....I had noticed that beofre. Thanks again belated Merry Christmas greetings to these boards! trisha