Two Questions - possibly in the wrong forum, and definitely making me feel stupid.

rolleyes Okay - first of all. I have Norton 360 - installed recently as a purchased download. Since then, perhaps coincidentally, my computer has been randomly shutting down. I want to back up my files using 360, but it seems like too much for my computer to handle, and it shuts down. Could it be an issue with the fan in the stack? And if so, is it safe to take off the cover and use compressed air to blow it out?
Secondly - my memory (I started with 60 GB, now am down to 22GB of available memory) is disappearing quickly. How can I determine what is hogging the memory, and take care of that?
Jeepers - I feel like I'm an intelligent person, but computers take me down! I wish I knew more, but hopefully someone on this board does!

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

Re: Two Questions - possibly in the wrong forum, and definitely making me feel stupid

Random shutdowns are generally caused by overheating. Take the top of your PC and make sure all the fans are spinning as sometimes these get gunged up with dust and crud and need to be cleaned.

As to your "memory" disappearing this is almost certainly hard drive space you are talking about run a program such as http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4191.html to recover some of your missing disk space.

 

Re: Two Questions - possibly in the wrong forum, and definitely making me feel stupid

What you're talking about there is not memory, it's drive space. This is a common mis-understanding. This article should help: What is Computer Memory? RAM vs Hard Drive. This article is out-of-date since memory is now also referred to in Gigabytes (GB), not just Megabytes (MB). Otherwise, the article is accurate.