Have 384 total memory (50%load) AOL says I should have between 20%-30% load How do I reduce the load? I have already made an AOL graphics file adjustment, but it did not reduce the load.

If you believe what AOL tells you, I have some land down in Florida that you might be interested in. :-)

Are you sure the "load" isn't referring the CPU utilization? What, exactly, is the message from AOL? Now, it could be that you are having difficulty due to the fact you are running XP on a 400 Mhz processor and that's what's causing things to be so slow (my guess as to your problem in the first place). Consider an upgrade (or a "downgrade" back to Windows 95/98/2000/ME) What do you have - a Pentium II? Celeron? K6-2?

Yeah, I agree with both posts. Are you actually getting an error msg from AOL (or Windows) or you just saw the recommended (20% - 30%) load values stated and are concerned cause you see 50%?? When up & running...Go to Start>all Programs>AOL>AOL System Info, and check your memory usage and resources usage, etc there. First off, make sure what memory this is actually talking about, that you are worried about? Is it talking about RAM, or graphics cache, VM on your hdd, etc? It is rediculous to expect (or even desire) your puter to run with a 20% RAM load. The closest to 100% is the most effecient usage for what you have paid for (and VM takes care of the rest. If all my programs are running at less than 50% memory usage then I have wasted $$ on RAM sticks, in general. If this is AOL-9 (a rediculously hoggish program anyway) It is recommended to run with 256MB RAM min anyway, so is WinXP, so 512MB is about optimal (as a minimum) for this program combo. Make sure your computer meets/beats requirements for the program version you are trying to run. Also note that AOL's system tools (if this is where you are getting these messages) are widely known to be really bogus with the info they spit out. Their spyware scanner is well known to cause system damage on some computers (corrupt IE, and winsock32 files, etc) so user cannot even get online anymore without repairs. So don't count too much on AOL tool programs and their output info. Good Luck

Some good advice has been given, pay heed. As for Aol I beta test for them and I have to admit under pentalty of getting drummed out, that no matter what version of AOL software you use, it's bloatware. It consumes many megs of ram when running. As for the testing and fixing of your computer by AOL yes indeed it can do some damage. The spyware removal tool is a joke. Avoid it at all costs. Ad-aware se is the best followed by spybot s&d. Then crap cleaner to round out playing susy homemaker on the system. www.ccleaner.com My guess is you have a slow p3 or a fast p2. Which is it? I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid...