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Odd memory issue in XP

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6 replies

by lump_16

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For the past week or so my system performance has diminished to a complete crawl.

Take a look at this:
http://www.wright-onthe-web.com/images/memory.jpg

I've disabled any startup items, swapped between 2 differnt RAM sticks, ran my windows udpates, ran a few windows rollbacks, ran a virus check still nothing seems to make a dent in this problem.

Checked my page file, was set to a custom size (something like 300 - 700 'ish) so I let windows set it automatically, still nothing.

Does it do this in safe mode you ask? I'd like to know that myself but I havn't been able to get into safe mode on my system in a year, but that's another topic all together.

I've got the data backed up and ready to re-install XP, but the problem has bugged me so much I want to find out whats going on here.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Brian Wright
http://www.wright-onthe-web.com

6 replies

by the world is an illusion

well my friend unfortunately you have a virus.
Some viruses hide in a computers memory taking up resources and space. It will make your memory appear smaller than it is. For example i looked at your picture. All of your specs have me beat except for your physical memeory, which is way lower then mine. I believe that you have a virus, and a nasty one at that.

by sgt_shultz

yep, and unless you tell me you have had firewall up with default settings i bet it is sasser
easy to fix as long as you can still boot. get fixsasser from www.symantec.com, run it, put on xp firewall (instructinos in article), go tet all windows critical updates and then get ad-aware from www.lavasoftusa.com and run it several times

by lump_16

BlackICE firewall up, and always up to date with my MS patches.
Being a phone support tech for a computer manufacture I've seen a good 50+ of the sasser worm calls. None of them had this symptom. Ran a norton scan and ran a scan online at Trend Micro, no virus found with either.

by nobby57

This is kind of a flyer, but have you just installed SP1? It caused two computers I know of to slow just as you described; one was a Dell laptop, the other an eMachines desktop. In both cases the SP had to go. I had the blaster worm -- one of the symptoms there was a proliferation of svchost instances and errors, but you probably know that. Good luck on the reformat and install -- don't forget to wipe the boot sector!

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