excuse my Noobness KSoD but what is pagefile? and what is my event viewer? I've got 372 gigs of space and only using 162.
I've been using ready boost lately to crank up my ram via usb but that doesnt really seem to make any difference. I also ran a malware and spyware checker last night and it found nothing at all...
I'm stumped..
Pagefile is where the system uses a set amount of Hard Drive space to act like RAM. The more Pagefile you set, the better the system can handle requests. Now on systems with more RAM, some say that you can disable Pagefile and it wont do no harm. This is true to an extent, but it means that more processes will be running and using RAM at all times instead of them being stored with the Pagefile.
Since you only have 2GB of RAM I am willing to bet that the system auto set the pagefile to be equal to that. You could boost it yourself but you might not get as much gain as you expect.
The Event Viewer is a tool built into Windows to tell you of errors that occur and other things going on with Windows.
Since you have so much free space what I was initially thinking wont apply. Sometimes when you don't have much free space left on your system it can cause adverse effects due to things like the pagefile, system restore and others all trying to fight for what space they can. But since you have well over the amount recommended, you are safe there.
The computer came with vista, I reinstalled windows 7 ultimate about 1.5 years ago. It had seemed to have gotten faster on 7 but I dunno how much of that was just due to the formatting and how much was actually thanks to 7.
I have norton endpoint and nothing else. Task manager most often hovers the cpu% around 3-5% and ram is often running around 40%. The only progs that seem to really hurt my ram usage are opera and chrome. Asides from that everything seems to stay under 10-12k.
Windows 7 in general is quicker than Windows Vista. So the increase you noticed was most likely due to that aspect.
That is pretty much expected when it comes to RAM usage. Windows Vista and Windows 7 use what is know as SuperFetch, which stores the most commonly used programs within RAM to allow them to load quicker. It is for that reason that it seems that more RAM is being used at all times, when in reality it is not. Of that 40% you say is active, only about 20% is actually being used till you start loading applications.
Opera and Chrome are both heavy users. They rely on multiple processes to accomplish their tasks. Chrome loads every tab as a new process as well as extensions. That is why you will see multiple instances of Chrome.exe loaded in that task viewer when it is open. It does this so that if an extension fails or webpage fails, you don't lose everything, just that extension or tab. It is a neat little trick and has been adopted by IE as well as Firefox to help with their force close tab issues.
The only thing you can really do is get more RAM to help the system. While using ReadyBoost is decent, it really doesn't do much for anyone. The way ReadyBoost is setup is to use the same size USB Drive as amount of RAM you have. So for you it would be a 2GB USB Drive to match your RAM. Plus if memory serves me right, ReadyBoost was kinda defunked with anything over 1GB. It was made for systems that use less than 2GB of RAM. Since you have 2GB you will not get the full benefits of what it has to offer. But really you wont get the full benefits as trying to use a USB device to act like RAM is not as effective.
You can always try using cleanmgr to clean up some junk. Just type in that command into a run prompt and it will bring it up. It will clear up some junk that is on the system.
