virtual memory problem

[Guest]

Wife has Dell 4100 laptop running Win Pro 2000. Very slow, drive grinds away
constantly. Tried clearing virtual memory by: Turning off VM, closed all
programs, defraged drive. Set VM to 150% of RAM.

Worked for 2 weeks and now its back to slow and grinding again. Shes got 256
MB of RAM. Using only 5GB of 20GB HD.

Ran spyware, registry tune up and other optimizer programs. Company she
works for does not provide real tech support or Nortons.

Suggestions?

 

[aD]

Wife has Dell 4100 laptop running Win Pro 2000. Very slow, drive grinds away
constantly. Tried clearing virtual memory by: Turning off VM, closed all
programs, defraged drive. Set VM to 150% of RAM.

Worked for 2 weeks and now its back to slow and grinding again. Shes got 256
MB of RAM. Using only 5GB of 20GB HD.

Ran spyware, registry tune up and other optimizer programs. Company she
works for does not provide real tech support or Nortons.

Suggestions?

In the defrag report, does it say if the pagefile and/or MFT is
fragmented badly? Or are there many directories or files that it cannot
defrag?
You might want to try PageDfrg from Sysinternals to see if the registry
hives are fragmented badly.

You say it lasted about two weeks after defragging - if you analyse the
disk again are there some files that are heavily fragmented again? It
could be one program that starts up regularly which gets heavily
fragmented that causes it.

Is it slow and grindy in safe mode? If not, try temporarily removing all
startup items to see if you find one that's causing it.

You could also reboot (start normally) fire up the Task Manager, go to
the Processes tab, go to "View->Select columns" and put in IO read
bytes, write bytes and other bytes.
See which processes have the most I/O usage and you might see if it's
something in particular that's causing the problem.

aD