Ok, before i explain the problem i should say a bit about my comp... i have an AMD Athlon XP 1.1Ghz with 192megs of pc133 SD RAM, a 20gig hard drive partitioned into a ~6gig and a ~14gig C and D drive. 64meg nvidia video card, everything else integrated. Im running windows XP Professional. so heres the problem: all my usual processes are using way more ram (virtual AND physical) than they used to.. after a fresh reboot my total ram would be around 120megs, but now its up at about 260megs... the same processes are running off startup, but for some reason, they're using way more memory... explorer.exe for exmple, is currently using 45megs total RAM, but if i use the comp for a while eventually it'll be up around 220megs... and smaller things like MSN 6.2, ive seen it using as much as 90megs of RAM total... ive been forced to increase my virtual ram size from 288megs to now 512megs, and even that is just getting by...with only a few programs open (mozilla, icq, msn) my total committ charge can reach upwards of 650megs... i just want to get things back down to a tolerable level, cause all this vitrual memory useage is slowing things down cause its reading from the hdd for pretty much everything i do... i hope ive made the problem clear enough, and i hope ive provided enough information... please help me find a solution to this problem...thanks in advance... - Redman

Hi Redman I am no expert. You have 192MB of RAM. You could use more. XP uses all of, at least, 128MB to run properly, and works better. Then you need more than that for running other programs. Try 256 or 512 more. HOW TO: Set Performance Options in Windows XP How to Configure Paging Files for Optimization and Recovery in Windows XP How to Clear the Windows Paging File at Shutdown Always check back for what others may have to say. Have a nice day.

You might wanna look into the indexing service in services. I googled an exe that was running in task manager (cant recall the exact name, but something like civc.exe) and found a long thread at a forum where tons of people were thanking the author because they disabled indexing service which fixed the same memory problems you have. You can get to it by right clicking my computer and choosing "manage", then open services. Then double click on indexing service and disable.

To find out what each Startup(or Process) item does or means, and any recommendation as to if you should close the process: Task List Programs Information about XP Services

thanks for the replies guys... Chuck 2, i was doing fine with 192megs until this problem started...i would boot up and be using about 120megs total physical and virtual.. im not concerned with buying more ram just yet, i want to get this working the way it was before all my processes became inflated, ram sucking beasts... i am buying a 512 chip in a few weeks, but thats irrelevant to this issue i think...thanks for the suggestion tho, its duly noted.. dazco, yep, ive disabled all the useless xp services already, i did that a long time ago...i have only 25 processes running at startup... any other ideas guys??

What services are running on the machine? Please post a full list. J. j e r u v y a t y a h o o d o t c o m

how do i go about posting a full list of the services currently running?