W2K Pro slows to a crawl after 30 minutes of use

[Ron]

Hello all. As my subject line suggests my W2K slows to a
crawl, nearly a lock-up condition, whenever I use it for
more than 30 or 45 minutes. It doesn't matter what program
I am using (IE, MS Word, Adobe Acrobat, etc.) the result
is the same. I have W2K Pro on one partition and W2K
Server on another on the same hard drive. I have a PIII-
500Mhtz with 256MB of RAM on a ProStar Laptop. Once upon a
time it all worked well together. Any ideas what is
causing this loss of resources? When I check
the "processes " tab in the "Task Manager" it quickly
changes to 97% or more in the "System Idle Process" line
but the performance does not improve. I have been using
Norton System Works Pro on the W2K Pro partition for the
past several years upgrading every year before expiration.
Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
RDR

 

[Kevin D. Quitt]

While you're looking in task manager, make sure you look at the column
called VM Size. Your problem sounds like a memory leak, and that column
will show you which process it is.

 

[Guest]

Thanks Kevin,
IEXPLORE.EXE appears to be the culprit. This is based on
it having the largest "VM Size" stat. Is the fix to
delete and re-install Internet Explorer?
Thanks in advance again,
RDR

 

[Kevin D. Quitt]

IEXPLORE.EXE appears to be the culprit. This is based on
it having the largest "VM Size" stat.

It's not a question of which is the largest, necessarily. Is the amount
of virtual memory required increasing over time? That would be the
indicator that there's a memory leak and you're slowing down because of
swapping. This isn't the only possible cause of a slow-down, but it is a
common one.

Is the fix to delete and re-install Internet Explorer?

IE isn't known to leak a lot of memory, although there may have been
versions that did. If you have plugins, one of them may be the problem.