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System Resources

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8 replies

by heatseeker37 May 21, 2002 last reply Aug 20, 2002

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How do you get your system resources back up high, before having to shutdown and restart your computer, otherwise the whole system crashes..
please HELP

8 replies

by hinrgman May 21, 2002

Probably the culprit that is consuming your resources is an application that was poorly written and does not release the resources when it is closed.

If this is the problem there is no way to increase your resources except by rebooting which reeleases those resources to start over.

Watch your resources and open and close your applications and take not what applications do not release those resources. therein lies the culprit.

by hinrgman May 21, 2002

You could possible increase your size of your temporary swap file (page file). That might increase the amount of time before all your resources are depleted.

by heatseeker37 Aug 20, 2002

The question was auto-closed by TechRepublic

by thechas May 21, 2002

Since the cause is most likely a memory leak, as described by answer 1, there are numerous freeware memory management utilities that can help clear memory.

Just go to your favorite download site, and choose a memory manager from the utilities section.

I like www.nonags.com
www.completelyfreesoftware.com

In addition, I use the following as resource minimums:
RAM; for W9X/Me, 128MB minimum, 384MB preferred, 511MB Maximum. (there is a large memory bug, and many systems won't even boot with 512MB or more)

Swap File: (virtual memory) I like to provide a seperate 2-4 GB partition for the swap file.
The 2 main benefits of this are that the swap file does not get fragmented, and other files do not get fit into "spaces" in the swap file.
This also takes care of a host of other "glitches" in W9X that involve the swap file.

It is also good practice to clean out the Windows\temp folder and the windows\temporary internet files folder on a periodic basis.

Many of the resource hogs leave files behind in the temp folder. It is safe to delete any files that are over a week old.

Another problem, is registry corruption.
Windows over time builds up a lot of bad, unneeded and useless keys in the registry, along with obsolete system files that are not purged when you chage hardware, or remove programs.
If your Windows installation is over 2 years old, or you change hardware and programs often, then wipeing the hard drive, and re-installing windows will provide significant performance improvement.

Finally, I would also search your system for "adware / spyware".
Many programs install secret programs that monitor activity, and report back to home.
Ad-Aware from Lavasoft www.lavasoftusa.com does a decent job of detecting and removing ad-ware.

Chas