Slow PC and RAM

[zulander]

OK my pc is running very poorly at the moment, seems to take ages while playing football manager and media player takes ages to load its not even quick on boot up. Its a 3500+ A64 on a Gigabyte board with 1gb of Geil Value Ram. I dont know if its just because i have lot of software on the machine running a lot of services (are there any proggies out there that scan the system and shut down services that dont need to be running in the background?) or if its just because my drives need a good defrag but the thing just crawls sometimes and cpu usage hits 100% when i havent got much open. Im just wondering if it would be worth getting some RAM for it and what the best place to get it from would be in terms of cost? Cheers

[jamin]

When was the last time you defragged mate? If its a while, then do it now. Really you should be defragging at least once a week!

[jackvdbuk]

if the CPU usuage hits 100% idle in windows i would defonatly suspect a virus or adware e.t.c thats defo not right... have a quick scan and defrag see how it turns out, also try registry cleaning/sorting

[ExceededGoku]

ye 100% CPU usage points to a virus.

[Mr Pants]

Program or virus is causing the problem

I have GEIL Value RAM in 3 systems and havent had a problem with the sticks

[kalniel]

Yup - could also be fragemented/bad sectors.

Recommend running full virus check, then adaware/spybot S&D to get rid of malaware, then running a full chkdisk, finally defragging.

[aidanjt]

run taskmgr.exe and kill off any processes you don't need, spot for the ones that are using stupidly high levels of ram and/or cpu usage, whether you installed them or not, if they're gobbling all your system resources without good reason they should go.