[Kosh]

Yesterday I had to reformat my computer and re-install Winblows XP because for some reason the Page File usage would go clear up to 900 MB and sometimes even over 1 gig (even when it was idling)! It did this for the entire day making the computer go so slow it was unusable.

It has done this every once in a great while in the past, but it was a one time thing and logging off or restarting it fixed it.

Reformatting it seems to have fixed it so far, but has this happened to anyone else? Does anyone have any idea what causes this to happen?

[mikhael]

lots of stuff eating memory is what causes it.

And the easiest way to stop the page file form growing out of control is to limit it in your system properties.

[Kosh]

Sorry I couldn't reply until just now, but I've been kind of....distracted with real life.

Originally posted by mikhael
lots of stuff eating memory is what causes it.

And the easiest way to stop the page file form growing out of control is to limit it in your system properties.

But the only things running in the background were just the usual stuff that I have had running for months. I checked the processes and there was NOTHING out of the ordinary.

Every once in a while I would play FS2 (on my previous Windows install) it would suddenly become very slow and I would exit out and find my PF usage at 1.12 GB. It would just randomly do that once in a while. Nothing was different about my system.  Anyway,restarting the computer was the only way I could get that memory back.

[mikhael]

That sounds like a memory leak: when a program asks the OS for memory, and then stops using it, but doesn't tell the OS that its not using it anymore. The memory just kinda fills up.

[Stealth]

yeah.  try Windows Update.  some of the critical updates should answer some of those issues... if they don't (if you're still having trouble) there's modules and external programs i can point you toward that will help with XP's memory usage, and finding out where your memory's going