Hi,
I had to do a repair install of XP recently and then reapply the service packs to take it back to SP3. Since then the pc has been very slow, some webpages take minutes to load and now I'm getting 'out of memory' errors from Adobe reader when I try to open a .pdf at the same time as having a browser window open. The pc has 2.5GB RAM, pagefile is set to system managed on C:\ and currently running at 2550MB allocated. I've tested the memory cards using MEM86 and there were no hardware errors reported; system information also reports the correct amount of memory BUT somehow the OS is not using the memory correctly. Below is a snapshot of the task manager performance tab with Firefox and Adobe Reader open (reader showing 'out of memory' error message)
The commit charge rarely goes above 750M; if I get really silly and open 8 programs it might climb to 900 but never higher, nor does the pagefile usage graph ever move above the low level seen above. Before the repair install memory and pagefile usage were a lot higher ie the OS was using both correctly, now something is preventing it using most of the memory available. I've scanned for malware and viruses using MBAM, SuperAntiSpyware and Avast and for rootkits using TDSSKiller and Avast's ASWMBR - no problems found. I've also used sfc/ scannow and again got no system file errors reported. Something in the main guts of the OS is not handling memory allocation and pagefile allocation as it used to, but it's beyond my abiliities to figure out what ... any help much appreciated, thanks. BTW I'm on Home Edition, so some of the system setup stuff just isn't included