Horrible Ram Usage

[nin137]

so i got home to my parents computer and my bro told me it was lagging like crazy (sound skipping, mouse lagging, so on so forth). i check the ram and about 215 mb of 256 mb are being used! i have no idea what for? i ran spybot, adaware, and avg and cleaned it out. uninstalled norton and then went through the system manager to find any offending programs. my bro said that they had just installed a new printer and it had started happening after that. any suggestions? or any ram optimization programs i could use?
thanks!

[mrmister1]

Did they install the correct drivers? Did they install any other printing utilities with it?

[Panama Red]

What happens if you uninstall the printer software and the printer?

[spyder003]

Are they using XP? You could head over to http://www.blackviper.com, use the guide there, and disable any unnecessary services.

[Panama Red]

You can check out what program/process is using all the memory by looking in the Task Manager. Ctrl+Alt+Del will get you there.

[Cricket]

When's the last time they defragged the hard drive?

Also, go to the Windows Temp folder and delete everything in it.

What kind of background programs do they have running on that computer? Is there a lot of icons in the system tray by the clock?

Cricket

[Hags]

Also, do you have onboard video?.....if so your mobo is giving around 32 mb to that

[nin137]

so i tried everything. freeing up ram, uninstalling the new printer drivers and nothing has worked. it's a really annoying problem, i mean i could barely use the computer when i was there. it basically seems to just completely freeze for a bout a split-second every 10 seconds. almost like there were a wheel and one part were cut out of it. i have no idea what it could possibly be. any suggestions?

[Cricket]

What is "everything"? Exactly what did you do?

Did you defrag the hard drive?

Did you scan for viruses, malware and trojans?

Did you disable any or all background programs?

Cricket

[sdkfz]

How full is the hard drive? If there is no room for the swap file you see a system slow down

[nin137]

i ran all cleaning applications (defrag, disk check, anti-virus, spyware check), i downloaded a freeramxp program, i uninstalled all the new drivers for the printer, i also checked for conflicts but couldn't find any. i checked through the background programs and disabled all that seemed superfluous. there were some that had me wondering, one was called p2pnetworking.exe and another called companion.exe, i don't know what the first one is, but the second one seems like an aol addon. they are using aol and i can say that aol loads so much unneccessary stuff it's unreal. even after disabling all those background programs it did the same thing. i tried to keep them from running at the beginning but there were no options to turn those two programs off in msconfig. they have plenty of harddrive space (20 gigs). could it be a hardware problem?

[Vigo]

p2pnetworking.exe is a process associated with a file sharing program. Most likely Kazaa, or a Kazaa run (network) application.

Companion.exe is an aol utility process

Why couldn't you uncheck them in msconfig? These are running as applications under start up correct?

You can also turn off services, but;
Instead of using msconfig to turn off services run: services.msc
Using services.msc will allow you to set services to manual (as well as toggle automatic/disable) this way you can stop services from running automatically but allow windows to run them if they're needed.

I would disable services which you are sure you do not need, example: If you don't have a wireless network set up, you can safely disable "wireless zero configuration". You'll see (hopefully) that its already set at manual and isn't running anyway, so I would concentrate on process that are labeled automatic, or labeled manual AND running. If you aren't sure if you need something, you can set it to manual and windows SHOULD run it on command... since I used the word SHOULD, you might want to only make a couple changes at a time, then reboot, and make sure everything works, as opposed to making several changes and then trying to figure out which one is causing a service you need from responding.

There are also programs that will help you decipher whats running on your machine aside from what task manager is telling you. HiJack This is one of them. You can download it and post the info you get from it WITHOUT making any changes until you're sure its safe to do so.

Posting the HiJack This log will allow us to see everything thats running on your machine so we can hopefully see whats causing the machine to bottleneck, or what you can get rid of to free up some memory.