Leosghost - 7:49 pm on May 31, 2009 (gmt 0)

Could be your disk is in desperate need of a defrag ..because this much Virtual memory should be more than enough ( If I remember correctly the optimal virtual memory is not normally bigger than twice your ram )..and to run XP I would have thought that 1.5 gig of Virtual memory was more than enough ..depends what you have open at the same time though ..

eg firefox will slow even most machines to a crawl if left running in the background ..be they linux or windows ..

even if you have loads of virtual memeory set up ..if the HD is badly fragmenetd ..the space that will be used to page for virtual memory will also be fragmented ..ideally it should be contiguous ..

Any machine will be faster if the virtual memory is on another HD ..even another partition ( BTW how is your HD partitioned) all info helps us ..

What would help to diagnose your problem is if you could open task manager and see what actually is eating your physical ram ..what is running in the procs tab ..what the mem use says for each proc "image name" and how many "handles" it is using ..

( that will tell us what you have ..if it should be there ..and if it's getting out of hand )

then go to the perf tab and see what it says in each of the "totals" .."commit" "physical" and "kernel" ..

check these two tabs at startup ( soon as the machine is stable ) and then leave the window open ..work as normal ..and when it gets to "treacle" see what they say again ..

but defrag first ..it may just be that ..
BTW the inbuilt XP defrag is OK but you would be better off downloading and installing jkdefrag [kessels.com] which is way better ..and totally safe ..

the reboot and check those two tabs ..

get back to us ..

[edited by: Leosghost at 7:51 pm (utc) on May 31, 2009]