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Does AV hog memory?

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by jardinier

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I am apparently the only person in the known universe who has had a happy experience with Windows ME.

The particular machine is an IBM with AMD 550 MHz CPU and 64 MB RAM. [Actually it is only 56 MB RAM because apparently 8 MB is dedicated to video].

I purchased this computer new about six years ago. It has NEVER done anything wrong -- not even a blue screen. The only peccadillo which it appears capable of is to very occasionally not shut down properly.

HOWEVER, commencing a few months ago, I noticed that the Hard Drive was working flat out all the time. The little green light was constantly active. Of course this slowed down every operation on the computer.

So I rang my instant personal help desk, Patrick Li, and his suggestions were:

1. Not enough memory.

2. Faulty hard drive.

So I opened the thing up and saw that there was just the one 64 MB memory stick in place, and as I happened to have another one handy, I popped it into the second slot. And Hey Presto !!! The problem was resolved.

The only explanation I can come up with is that AV applications are so large now -- with often relatively large daily updates -- that the AV was the culprit that was hogging memory, forcing the machine to use virtual memory on the hard drive and hence constant hard drive activity.

I will welcome any other suggestions as to why the machine needed additional memory despite the fact that there was a minimum of applications installed.

5 replies

by jdclyde

I am running AVG, which is considered to be fairly light, and it is sucking up about 40mb (running WinXPsp2).

Running Norton/Symantic was even worse.

I assume you do run defrag?

How much free HD space do you have? If you start running low, that will impact your system because of swap files/temp files and everything else files....

Do you clear out your temp folder?

The only other thing I could think of that would make a change would be if you DID pick up a malware? Have you done full scans while in safe mode?

When you say "minimum of applications installed" where any recent?

by jardinier

I have already stated clearly that additional memory fixed the problem with that particular machine.

Although the machine itself has always behaved perfectly, I recently had to use the recovery disk because some downloaded program stuffed up the computer. I have installed a minimum of applications because this is a machine which I use mainly for checking emails (it is at my workplace.)

I used to use Vet AV on all my machines and never caught a virus in 9 years. With Vet you got a customer number with which you could download the software (illegally of course) on as many machines as you liked. Now they have serial numbers so that you can only download it onto X number of machines --according to how many licences you purchase.

Currently I have that on one machine and it behaves as it always did. I have installed AVG Free on all my other machines and partitions. This appears to have MUCH LARGER daily updates than Vet (now called Computer Associates eTrust AV).

In answer to your other questions:

1. Yes I degrag regularly.

2. I have oodles of free hard drive space -- 5 GB or more on each of the machines I use.

3. I regularly delete temporary internet files.

4. Using File Manager -- which has some definite advantages over Windows Explorer -- I search for all tmp files with *.tmp

With File Manager you can delete these without them going via the recycle bin.

5. As for safe mode, alas the machine that is my workhorse is set up to dual-boot into 98 SE or XP. I have not been able to boot that up in safe mode, but I will ask the technician who installed the software if it is possible to do this.

On this machine in the 98 SE partition which is the one I mostly use, Spybot will locate the nasties but freezes (crashes) when I try to delete them. I daresay safe mode may be the answer if I can find out how to do it.

However it is functioning normally so I guess there is nothing there that is slowing things down.

This particular machine which is a Compaq has P III 1 GHz CPU and 320 MB RAM partitioned with 15 GB for 98 SE and 25 GB for XP Pro.

Thanks for your suggestions.

by jdclyde

if the 98 system won't let you run the clean, boot the the xp and run the scan on the other partition.

by jardinier

Hi Jeff

The way my dual-boot is set up means that from the XP partition, I can access via Windows Explorer any file or application from the 98 partition. The reverse is not true however because 98 is on the primary partition and reads drive D as the CD drive etc.

XP is named drive D on its partition, so it can read 98 which is drive C.

So I will give it a go.

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