Hello I've been asked by the company i work at to take a look at a laptop called the brick named after it's speed It's a Dell Inspiron 6000 and is extremly slow. There are no obvious signs of spyware or a virus but after watching the system monitor for a minute it looks like it is running out of ram I suggested upgrading the ram which they are willing to do but i am just checking that it is most likely the ram that is making it go so slow as it gets down to 60 meg of ram free at some points Thanks

Adding RAM will help, but I have a computer that's been running fine with XP and 256MB of RAM for almost 3 years. Go to Start>Run, type "msconfig" press enter, in the General tab uncheck "Load Startup Items". Reboot and see if that helps. America needs to realize that there's a God in Heaven that's one day going to have her citizens give an account for their actions.

If there is still 60mb of free ram then it might not be a RAM issue. What drastically slows a system down is when it runs out of free RAM completely and has to use the page file all the time, then it gets into what is called thrashing. You can use the following websites to weed suspicious applications out of the msconfig startup tab. http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/sta... http://www.answersthatwork.com/Task... http://www.processlibrary.com/

I had another look at it today and took a screen shot of it's performance after opening up several programs http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/... I also went through the startup list and there were no viruses of any kind and most of the processes seemed nesscary Should i just reformat it? I have about 45 minutes to make a choice

There are alot of things running in your tray. I would close all of them down and see if it is faster because your commit charge is way higher than your RAM. It says it is 363200. It should be no higher than 230000, preferably lower. Any higher than 230000 will definitely result in a performance drop. Since you opened up several programs before taking this screenshot, reboot your PC and see what your Commit Charge is without any programs running. It shouldn't be higher than 230000. America needs to realize that there's a God in Heaven that's one day going to have her citizens give an account for their actions.

I can't restart it as my boss is out of the office for the rest of the day and i won't be able to log back on but it's been idle for about 3 hours and is at 289182 edit:and no programs were running either

That's way too high. Your best bet is to either reinstall Windows or finding out which program(s) is taking all of your memory. Since Windows has no free RAM available, it starts storing temporary data on the hard disk in the page file, which is a slower medium than RAM, which is why the PC is so slow, which someone already said earlier in this thread. America needs to realize that there's a God in Heaven that's one day going to have her give an account for her actions.