Shortly after booting up the computer slows to a crawl, with the hard drive buzzing constantly. On check tasking manager the cpu is at 2 or 3%, but the page file usage is at 1.09GB. After about 5 minutes this drops to 233Mb and everything is fine, only to jump back up to 1.09Gb and everything slows right down. There are no programs running that show high memory usage. Anyone have any ideas? This is driving me crazy. I've done the usual Norton/Spybot/Adaware checks.

Unless you're running some memory-intensive programs, you don't need a paging file with 1GB of RAM.

How do I change the Paging File setting?

Control Panel > System > click on Advanced tab > click on Settings in Performance box > click on Advanced tab > click on Change under Virtual Memory > select No Paging File > click on Set. Then hit all the OKs & Applies on the way out. Restart your computer for changes to take effect.

Good idea with 1 gig of ram, speeds things up to no end. But be warned any hickups and any work you are doing at the time will not be paged back to disk. The fact you were having such problems sugests you have somethig in the background that was going nuts. Check your start up programs and see what was running at the time. Click on start Click run Type in MSCONFIG and hit enter key The configuartion utility will bob up. Click on STARTUP Have a good look at the programs and remove the tick from anything you know shouldnt be there. Once done click apply and rebbot. On boot up you will get the pop up that you are using selective start up, put a tick in the box and click OK. That should take care of a lot of programs that start for no reason. See how you go with that. But make sure that your perfomance options are set to Programs and not background services or systems cache. But your page file size on the hdd should be 1536 minimum and 3072 maximum with 1 gig of ram. But what smiling jack suggested does work very well, I run that config myself. Hope thats some help to you. IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT - SIGNATURE COURTESY OF BUZZ187