XP Pro and RAM

[Giraffe]

XP Pro, SP3, 1GB RAM.

On boot, when things have loaded and settled down I have ~440MB of RAM free. If I just leave the PC for 15 min. or so the RAM free increases to about 580MB.
During this time, apps. are a bit slow to load as the HDD is intermittently but frequently busy - I assume that there's a lot being written to it.

Is it that there are a lot of .exe/.dll files in RAM on boot and, if so, how can I stop this? It's almost as if the OS is trying to load in to RAM and then writing out again.

[Behemoth]

If you goto the run box on the start menu and type in msconfig and then goto the startup tab you can stop alot of things that are starting up on your system, that may help you out.

You may also want to throw an extra gig of ram in there, if your motherboard takes DDR 2 its not overly expensive at the moment, pretty much as cheap as chips

[Giraffe]

Thanks for the suggestions, Behemoth.

The only things starting are those that I want; also I'm not worried about the RAM - even with everything I usually run I have ~250MB left.

It's only the HDD activity that bothers me as it slows down the opening of apps. Once it's stopped everything is OK.
With >500MB of RAM left I don't really need any more

[[GSV]Trig]

Be careful with msconfig.

[Giraffe]

I v. rarely use it as it's typical M$ junk; Starter is much better:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/S.../Starter.shtml

[scaryjim]

Could be your anti-virus software doing a startup scan, or the indexing service? Also I assume you regularly defrag? One of my colleagues at work used to have to wait about 10 minutes for her laptop to start up - I defragged it and reduce that to about 2!!

[Giraffe]

No, no AV running then and defrag OK, thanks.

It's to Desktop in 44s and all apps. loaded by 55s; it's just the amount in RAM (~140MB) being written slowly to HD.

I'll try adjusting the swap file from its default od 1314MB down t0 50 - 50MB and see if that helps. If it's fired up at 440MB left I don't mind that.

[Singh400]

Without a dump of your process list and msconfig startup tab we can't help. Get those, and we'll have a starting point.

[Giraffe]

Thanks Singh400, but <blush> I don't know how to get those.

The items starting are the same as they've been for a couple of years - I think that I might have done something that loads stuff in to RAM, as I used to boot with ~550MB of RAM left and now it's ~440MB and gradually climbs back.

[jim]

Behemoth explained how to get the startup list in post #2, process list you can see in task manager. Just make sure that the show all button is ticked.

[Singh400]

Easiest way would be to get HiJackThis, run and save the logfile and paste it here.