Page File Usage

[orangetlh]

Hello to all you IT technical people, im pretty good at solving problems with me comp but it has been running very slow lately and when i have i tunes running in the background, the music pauses or skips every time i open a new page on IE or even scroll through. In the task manager there seems to be lots of programmes running, about 30 or 40 and my page file usage in the performance tab is running high even when the pc is idle. Any ideas what is happening? Im concidering taking everything off and starting again from scratch.

 

[DaveL]

OK first thing, do you have an up to date anti virus package running?
You could have something running in the background that you don't know about :x
It could also be spy ware so check for that as well.
If your sure you have these covered then we will have to look at what the machine is doing.

 

[les chicken]

I too will be following this thread. My cpu is running at about 6% but the pf is about 60% the machine feels that it is running through mud at times.

I do have norton 2006

Les

 

[Anonymous]

Norton is quite a resource hog


I am wondering if you apporeciate exactly what a page filke is? if so, then please accept my apologies for the egg-sucking that follows. Basically, your PC has several types of storage media:

ROM (EEPROM)- non-volatile storage for BIOS information - the white text on black background you see at startup is from the BIOS. Holds information about your hardware and tets it at startup.

RAM - volatile memory where programs actually run - nothing (permanently) stored there except variables and data being used by the program. Typically 1GB+ these days. Chunks of silicon with millions of transistors. Accessed in nanoseconds. FAST

Hard disk - programs are stored there - over a million times slower than RAM for read/write operations (milliseconds rather than nano seconds to access). Much slower as it is a magnetic media with spinning platters (disks) being read. SLOW

Well, the swapfile (page file - effectively another name for the same thing) came about becuase in the good old days (when I built my first PC), RAM cost the earth and typically one might have tens or hunderds of MB, not GB. The first one I built had 10MB hard disk and 128K of RAM . So, Windows used hard disk as temporary storage for stuff that was not accessed to often but required 'memory' to run in or for storage.

Your swap file is hard disk being used as RAM and even these days itr is essential as with the increase in RAM in PCs came a more resource hungry Windows OS and more hungry apps (3D type graphics packages uses bags of RAM during operation for instance.). Windows manages swap files very well these days and it is rare for a problem to be casued by it unless your hard drive is getting very full - the swap rfile is dynamic and might require a bit more space when you have a dozen programs runnign at once.
So, the swapfile is a neccesity and is unlikely to be the source of youir problem IF you do not have too many applications running at one time - check free memory rather than page (swap) file.

By the way, Itunes 7 is known to be very resource hungry too.

 

[orangetlh]

Thank you Tony, to be honest i didnt have a clue what it is, only assumed that it could be that as it was runing quite high. Will do a thorough virus and spywayre check ad get back to you.

 

[Russell]

My pc was doing similar just reinstalled windows and wnet for AVAST fro anti virus, Zone alarm for firewall plus spybot search and destroy and ad-aware for spyware etc. Change bowser to firefox its now running faster than ever and is a tighter than a ***** **** for virus etc and all that software is downloadable freeware. Top result.

 

[orangetlh]

Got rid of all the spyware and the computer is running fine now. I always check for viruses but keep forgetting about the spyware. Thanks for the help everyone