Low Virtual Memory Msg (XP Home)

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About two months ago I got a new XP Home PC. Starting two weeks ago, within the first hour of use, there was a message saying that the virtual memory was set too low and would be increased. And there were intermittent bursts of intense hard drive activity (and system slowdown) lasting for several minutes. Presumably, this was the virtual memory at work. Why did this start happenning? My running programs are minimal, less than on my old Win98 machine. Norton AV checks ok. AdAware checks ok.

I fiddled with various settings, but what made the problem go away was disabling (Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services) the Task Scheduler. The only task scheduled was Symantec NetDetect, probably for automatic Norton AV updates. Could the Task Scheduler have been changed (by a MS Critical Update) causing it to use more system resources? Or could the Norton AV NetDetect or the Automatic Updater have been changed (by an update)? Is anyone else seeing similar increased intermittent system use?

Recently, on some forum (not sure if it was on the Lounge) there was a post from a user who was monitoring RAM usage and was seeing occasional unexplained bursts of activity caused by “System”. No response to his post offered a complete answer. Does anyone know where this post is? Unfortunately I lost track of where I read this. I am wondering if he was experiencing the same basic problem as me, but his PC had more RAM and the “virtual memory too low” was never activated.

So now my PC is running fine, with the Task Scheduler off. Any thoughts? Thank you. …J.Till

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Update. Cowboy , thanks for your kind offer of help, but I decided to go with a do-it-yourself approach: read previous posts, Google search, review other websites etc. And I learned a ton about WinXP and disabled a number of non-essential services. But I didn’t fix the low virtual memory problem, which, contrary to my earlier post, was not really fixed.
The problem was actually my screensaver, which was freeware that I had used without any trouble on Win98. Every time the screensaver kicked in (and it never appeared on my screen) the low virtual memory message came on and a lot of hard drive activity happened. The light (in my brain) didn’t come on until I was looking at my display options and realized I had chosen a screensaver but had never actually seen it work. Well it was trying to work, but was causing a problem. I don’t know if this screensaver was not WinXP compatible or had become corrupt as it was copied. But problem solved. And I learned some stuff too. ……J. Till

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Update. Cowboy , thanks for your kind offer of help, but I decided to go with a do-it-yourself approach: read previous posts, Google search, review other websites etc. And I learned a ton about WinXP and disabled a number of non-essential services. But I didn’t fix the low virtual memory problem, which, contrary to my earlier post, was not really fixed.
The problem was actually my screensaver, which was freeware that I had used without any trouble on Win98. Every time the screensaver kicked in (and it never appeared on my screen) the low virtual memory message came on and a lot of hard drive activity happened. The light (in my brain) didn’t come on until I was looking at my display options and realized I had chosen a screensaver but had never actually seen it work. Well it was trying to work, but was causing a problem. I don’t know if this screensaver was not WinXP compatible or had become corrupt as it was copied. But problem solved. And I learned some stuff too. ……J. Till

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