Windows 2000 Slow Down

I am coming here from the Malware Forum. The Windows 2000 machine I use for business and personal use has been recently experiencing slow downs in response to mouseclicks and movement of "the slider" on e-mail and wikipedia. I had felt sure that I was clotted up with Spyware and Malware, but Kestral13! has walked me through numerous checks and is fairly confident Malware ain't it. Would anyone here have any ideas?

At one time in the past I had received numerous popups saying that "Virtual Memory needed to be accessed, and some funtions may not work, etc." A help forum I used at that time solved the issue by increasing the virtual memory size, in a process I don't immediately recall. I might look to do that, except I am not getting the virtual memory popups, and I don't know if there is a limit/tradeoff to increasing the virtual memory.

The machine has 18.6 GB, with about 5.2 GB free. I have been reminded that refers to hard disk space. On the Task Manager, it says I have Total Physical Memory of 130K "Available" at 38K (although it has been below 10K at times), and a "System Cache" of 45K. The "Kernel Memory" is 54K, with
37K "paged" and 17K "non paged."

 

What is the make and model of your machine?
How much RAM(memory) is installed?
When was the last GOOD defrag performed?

 

HRLOW2:
Machine is a Gateway, which has been in use easily for 8 years. By going to Settings>Control Panel>System, it says 130596 KB RAM. Last Defrag was probably within the last year.

PLODR:
Unless there's another place to look for RAM other than at the Control Panel, that's what I think I've got.

The slowdowns were not a big issue until I started having to wait for things to open up. Sometime responses to mouseclicks on Word will take upwards of 30 seconds, and I'll start to wonder if I clicked right. Other times I can click on a button on a website, and the wait will cause me to look around for something to read while waiting for the item to open. As stated in the original post, sometimes the slider on e-mail and websites will hang up, and it will take maybe a minute for the display to catch up to my frustrated movement of the mouse. Sometimes the display on the screen will trail my hunt n' peck typing.

Other times it runs smooth as silk, and I'll be wondering if I have a problem.

I looked up virtual memory in the Help section of Windows, and it gave directions to the spot where it can be adjusted. It says Drive C has a Paging File space available of 5678MB. It was set at 500MB Initial and 500MB maximum. Just to see if it would make a difference, I moved the Initial to 750MB and Maximum to 1000MB. However, I freely admit I don't know what I am doing.

 

I would guess that increasing the physical RAM would be a good bet.
What you have sounds like only 126MB. More would be a big improvement in performance.
Slowing down because programs have to wait to get RAM as it becomes available for use.

 

HRLOW2:
How can I confirm your 126MB conjecture? The Gateway may be a model E-4200 if that helps. Does this mean that a physical card of "memory capacity" will need to be added. If so, will that be a question for the hardware forum?

Since the noticeable slowdown only occurred within the last month, would it be an idea to remove stuff from the hard drive? Note it is an 18.6 GB system with about 5 GB free.

 

If the machine is bone stock and has had no upgrades done, read this.
Go to paragraph 3.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/23337/gateway_e4200_400.html.

 

hrlow2:
Maybe I need some guidance in the difference between "Performance" and "Memory." In the article it states that the E4200 performance is slow, as in very slow when compared to similar machines. Does this refer to the fact that a startup takes just about 5 minutes from the pressing of the "on" button?

The Memory is described in the article as being larger than the average bear. Does this mean that I can switch between Unix accounting, to Word, to Publisher faster than other machines? Although they often do switch quick once they are up, getting up upon clicking the icon can take time, sometimes a half a minute.

The issue that caused me to seek help was the fact that the sliders on e-mail would frequently get stuck, when it hadn't before, and that the monitor display would often lag behind my typing as it is now as I write this. As I am writing this the Panda AntiVirus is updating via the Knology cable connection, but the Task Manager says only about 9% of CPU usage is being used. It says that the Physical Memory available is in the 3000K range. However when things REALLY started to slow down just now the CPU usage did go to 100%. The Memory usage has however stayed in the middle of the graph at around 425 K.

Switching between the task manager and this posting got to be a real chore, as when I clicked back to Mozilla, a gray cube where the task manager had been would remain and would not go away until I gave up and closed the task manager. Even then, with the Panda Update having completed and the CPU usage going back down to 2 %, the cursor on the posting form has been herky-jerky. I'll type an entire bunch of sentences "blind" and then the display will spit them out in a stream.

I guess I am confused as to what 126MB of RAM is as compared to Memory, as compared to Hard Drive space. Are documents and photos saved on the computer going to affect performance even when Word or Adobe Photo Album are not open?

Perhaps the question at hand is what can I do? What is eating up my processing capacity? This slow down is new, within the last month. The only big changes have been things done at the Malware forum to try to check for Malware and Spyware. Short of calling in a professional to physically eyeball the system is there anything you could suggest I look at? Would disabling some of the functions of the Antivirus help? Would eliminating Word Documents or Photo's help? Is there any way I can cut and paste processes (there are about 40 of them running according to the task manager) that you could look at possibly identifying some as being suspect? I could transcribe them, but that would be laborious. Would typing in the process name in the search box give me a way to figure out what it is supposed to be doing? Some of them I might be able to guess as to function, but some such as APVDXWIN.EXE are a mystery (using about 11K "mem usage"). As I was writing this only Mozilla connected to Major Geeks and the PC World article was on. The Panda Antivirus caught and blocked a popup on the PC World site. As I write this the cursor will freeze for almost a minute before giving it back.

Now that I have largely stopped writing and was reviewing what I wrote, the cursor and display are back in sync, and the slider moves smooth. Clicking the task manager back on it says there are 38 processes happening, and clicking back and forth between this and the task manager is a blink. It is OK now, but there doesn't to be any rhyme or reason to what is happening.

Any help/suggestions are appreciated.

 

Your RAM is you memory. RAM is Random Access Memory.
That is the little sticks about 6 inches long that plug into your machine. Easiest and fastest upgrade possible to do.
Generally, more is better. You should try to get at least 1GB installed.
As you work, things get saved into memory. Other programs that need memory have to wait until something that is already using memory gets finished . Then memory is released so something else can make use of it.
Also if you have any programs on a schedule to run automatically( AV scan, defrag) will slow you down.

 

Found another page that says that 348MB is the maximum your machine can hold. That would be 3 slots of 126MB in each slot. Still a big improvement over your current configuration.

 

OK, but why would 126MB of RAM have been more than enough when the machine was built, enough so that PC World would take note of it? Do modern day machines have 1 GB of RAM? Is that because of the proliferation of games?

And it hung up AGAIN as I was typing this. It would seem that something would have had to be added significant to change this. Would Mozilla be the cause of this possibly? I started using it about three months ago when some functions kept sending popups that the IE is was using (5, I think) was too old.