Excessive memory usage?

[LeoZwalf]

Over the past few weeks my PC seems to have become slower. I think it could do with a reformat though.

Tonight it is starting to get on my nerves, I had a look at the task manager and the page file is at 510mb!

I've got the following open/running:
- Outlook Express
- Opera (with 4 webpages open)
- 1 email open
- Media player, playing mp3s
- Zone Alarm
- A bluetooth thing which sits in the system tray
- a couple of normal Windows windows

I'm on XP Home SP2, 768mb RAM, AMD Sempron 2800+ (runs at 2ghz). 10gb free on C: (defragged it a couple of days ago)

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

[momentofmadness]

Get the Task Manager up - CTRL + ALT + DELETE, then click the Processes tab and see what is hogging your resources.

"System Idle Process" should be at 90-odd percent.

[LeoZwalf]

Cheers - but I discovered that the Opera cache was using 400mb of HD So I've turned it down to a more sensible amount and it's running much better.

Also found a couple of unnecessary processes running (iPod stuff due to iTunes - I don't even own an iPod and never use iTunes!) so I've disabled them from the startup which hopefully will help more.

[shocker-z]

LeoZwalf said:

Also found a couple of unnecessary processes running (iPod stuff due to iTunes - I don't even own an iPod and never use iTunes!) so I've disabled them from the startup which hopefully will help more.

That will be quicktime then mate.. when you update quicktime it install iTunes


Regards
Liam