Hi
I just bought a new pc with 1.86 GHz core2duo and 2 gig ram. I am,
however, getting an odd thing happening.
When I start to use the pc, I can open explorer windows and programs
fine. After a while, though (and I leave my pc on for a few days
sometimes) I open up maybe 4-6 IE7 windows and then I cannot do any
more. by this I mean
- I cannot open any more explorer windows
- I cannot open anything at all, including control panel, task
manager, notepad
- I cannot access any menu on any window which is already open,
including right click menus
I have not changed any virtual memory options, and not installed much
else, apart from nero and avg
any ideas?
Cheers
Let Vista tell you what's going on with your system. I've mentioned
how to bring up the Task Manager many times. (Ctrl-Atl-Del) Here's a
much more detailed article on how to use Vista's new system monitoring
features, which are mostly covered on page two of the following
article:
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6121730.html
As far as leaving Windows on for "days", while common practice, is in
my opinion usually DUMB practice for several reasons. Windows has only
so many resources it can draw on, when they get used up, Windows
starts to slow down, it can even stop working. To avoid getting super
technical and start yacking about memory paging files, hives, heaps
and all kinds of cool "geek stuff" what you need to remember is a
simple analogy. When you reboot all the crap goes away, much like
flushing a toilet. If you don't flush or reboot every so often, well
things can overflow and get rather messy. ;-)
Now if you want to get a better understanding of what Windows is doing
bring up Task Manager, go to Performace Tab, then click on Resource
Monitor. You'll see four real time graphs that fairly accurately
reflect what's happening with your system as you use it.
Using mine as an example, right now my CPU is under 3% load, so its
just loafing along and not doing much. So let me push it by starting
to render a video project using Vegas, my video editor. As you would
expect, that spiked the CPU, Disk and Memory useage graphs. Right now
my CPU is up to 78% useage. But wait... there's more information.
Under the graphs are little arrows pointing down. I'm clicking the one
under CPU, now I see a detailed list of what by "process" is using the
CPU. A process can be a application or something Windows needs to run
to do certain tasks or just to do housekeeping in the background. As
expeced Vegas is taking the lion's share any varies between 75-82%
while everything else that's running, like my news reader Agent,
Window Explorer, the sidebar, DUMeter, and about 30 other processes
reflect how much CPU load they are contributing.
Trying to avoid getting too technical. A process can be any of your
applications or some internal Windows function. These run in one or
more threads. Example the Resource Monitor is showing that Vegas is
using 23 threads to run while Windows Explorer even though it is
presently idle and just a icon sitting on the Task Bar is still
hogging 30 threads or more than Vegas that right now is rendering a
video. Some applications, depeding on how well they are written and
also on what they do may or may not release memory or links to some
internal process, like a hook to the Registry when they are done using
them or are just sitting idle. So when you open multiple instances of
Explorer each instance runs seperately and hogs more and more system
resources...even if it isn't doing anything. That's why your system
starts to "get tired", because so many threads and handles can be open
it becomes quite a mess to manage as you would expect.
Looking further, the Windows Kernel and some system events in the
background are using 120 threads. Looking back on the performance tab
Task Manager reports 708 threads currently running controlled by
17,040 "handles". There's all kinds of articles on the web that
explain what handles, threads, hives and so on do if you're
interested. Just a word of caution, you're getting into the deep end
of the pool if you want to understand some of these geeky topics. ;-)
Going further, clicking on Disk shows how each process is accessing my
hard drives. For example Vegas as you would expect when rendering has
wrote to the hard drive a lot. In a similar fashing clicking on the
Memory down arrow to see the details by application again shows Vegas
being very busy as you would expect.
So in summary, if Windows seems sluggish or just isn't as fast as you
think it should be, the first place to start looking is in Task
Manager and the new greatly expanded Resources monitor that gives all
kinds of information. This combined with reading what Vista recorded
as "events" in its collection of Event Logs, accessible from Control
Panel (use Event Viewer under Administrative) you can really learn a
lot about what Windows is doing, trying to do and is having trouble
with.
