Excessive Swapping

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ben Mayer
  • Start date Start date
B

Ben Mayer

I have a Dell 5150 3.06GHz w/ 512MB RAM.

Of late my system has decided that it needs to swap almost
constantly. The system can be sitting there not doing
anything and it will start to swap for 10+ mins. Even
using it has started to become painful. It reports that
about 450MB of memory is used by various applications.
This has been happening for about 2-3 weeks now. Any ideas?
 
Hey Ben,

What measurements are you taking to make you feel its swapping ?

Are you monitoring paging activity in performance monitor, or are you basing
it on a disk activity LED. Some disk activity does take place when the
system is idle due to windows xp inbuilt housekeeping tasks.

Where are you getting the figure of 450MB from?

Whats the largest process on the system in taskmanager. Look at VM size and
mem usage.
You may need to add these through View/Select columns. You can make life
easier by clicking on the column heading to sort them in order.

Check in the task manager performance screen, what figures are given under
Commit Charge for Total, Limit and Peak.

As always check for viruses as some of these along with adware and malware
can eat up memory but its better to find out the cause.

Symantecs free online virus scan would be a good place to start.

http://security.symantec.com/sscv6/default.asp?productid=symhome&langid=ie&venid=sym



Free Anti virus software www.grisoft.com
Free Firewall www.zonelabs.com
Free Adware Blocker http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/
Free malware and spyware cleaner http://www.safer-networking.org/


Paul
 
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