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This is not conducive to speed. Tone it down a bit.

Help me understand why? If the CPU is not busy, and there’s RAM available, why should multiple apps cause an issue?

Obviously when I’m pushing the RAM limits, e.g. with my VMs, then I’m going to create swapping. But until I get to that point, I understood there was no significantpenalty for running multiple programs. If I doubled my RAM to 16GB so I was nowhere near running out of RAM, would my performance still suffer from running lots of stuff?

Autoruns says there’s a ton of stuff — possibly lots more than the old laptop, but hard to tell. But the CPU usage is very low and the RAM usage is low until I load up my tons of apps. So I wouldn’t expect that to be the problem.

Procexp currently shows 165 processes running. Like Task Manager, it shows only about 10% CPU usage. Resource Monitor shows very little disk or network activity.

The system is running Win7 SP1, fully patched. I can’t guarantee all the drivers are running the latest — I’d have to chase that somewhere, probably on the HP site.

My Win7 laptop is in the shop so I’m ranting from memory, but…

I think the W7 search stinks, to put it mildly. I haven’t found a way to control it at all so it returns zillions of hits from email messages &etc when I’m just trying to find a file with “xyz” in the filename. You can’t sort the results to try to isolate them by filename or location.

Actually looking at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Advanced-tips-for-searching-in-Windows I see there are a bunch of keywords to control the search. So maybe I can limit it to search filenames if I can remember their obscure syntax. But I’d like some simple things like sort capabilities. Am I missing something?

I generally use the Everything search engine (http://www.voidtools.com) if I need to find something by filename.

I think something is hosed in my OS. I just rebooted a couple of times while updating software, and I started seeing sluggishness, spinny circles, and “(Not Responding)” applications within a few minutes of rebooting — with CPU only 40-50% busy and only 1.4GB RAM in use. It shouldn’t start running out of memory until it hits at least 2-2.2GB.

I think it’s something with the system itself. I’m pretty sure the system is clean malware-wise. I’m running Security Essentials and I just ran a Malwarebytes scan of my system. Everything is clean. As far as I can tell the system is in great shape — except it runs like molasses.

Maybe I just need to start over and re-install Vista. Again.

EDIT: It’s worse than I thought. I just rebooted again. All I had running was Thunderbird (plus whatever background processes), with less than 1GB in use, and I started getting spinning circles and “(Not Responding)” with that. This OS is just hosed. **SIGH** I’d be tempted to wipe it and install Win7 but this laptop is probably on its last legs, and I don’t want to buy Win7 if I’m going to have to buy another laptop in a few months anyway. But I don’t particularly want to reinstall Vista either.

Clint, this was happening while I was actively using the system. When it didn’t work, it didn’t work even when I actively directed the system output to the laptop monitor. I’m quite sure it wasn’t a screen-saver type of thing.

Ted, the laptop is 2+ yrs old. Still appears to be in very good shape. But you never know…

Nope, it’s a laptop with only one HD. Nice try though.

Hmm, thought: I wonder if open network files contribute to this problem? Recently I’ve been working on a bunch of files across the LAN — 3-4 of the PDFs I’ve got open, several Word files, a PPT or two. Previously I edited local copies but I’ve had to move to the shared copies on the LAN to avoid editing collisions. Long shot, but…

Tee Kay, interesting idea! But it doesn’t apply here. All I have on my Desktop is about 18 shortcuts.

Bob, I understand thrashing. That’s why I mentioned in my original post that the disk light is quite often totally inactive when apps hang up with (Not Responding) and the spinning icon.

I have 32bit Vista so I’m limited to 4GB RAM, of which only about 3-3.2GB is available to Windows.

According to Task Manager my memory use peaks at about 2.2GB. Anything beyond that and the system grinds to a near-halt. I don’t know where the other 1GB is used but it doesn’t show in Task Manager.

(EDIT: I just added up the numbers in the “Working Set” column in Task Manager. They match fairly closely with the “memory usage” numbers on the Performance tab. I’m running around 2.3GB “in use” out of the 3.3GB the system SHOULD be able to see, and still my system is crawling. Which I believe is a separate issue from the Firefox freezes, since those happen even if the system isn’t loaded.)

No, the freezes are NOT due to network limitations. 1) When the video freezes, the audio continues playing just fine. 2) These freezes DO NOT happen only with Youtube &etc, it’s just one of the more annoying situations. I see little hangups while I’m just typing this message into the reply pane. Scrolling windows also show the freeze. If I click the mouse wheel and set up a smooth slow scroll, I see show stutters every 2-4 seconds and a longer pause every 10-12sec or so. (That may be worse since I installed Memory Fox.) **ALL** of FF freezes up, except, oddly, the audio in streaming video.

I think I spoke too soon. FF is now up to 345MB with only 11 open tabs. Furthermore I just watched a video and while the freezes were short, maybe 1/2 – 3/4 sec, they were happening every 8-10 seconds like clockwork.

I just tried deleting all tabs except one empty tab, and the memory use only went down to 330MB. The only addons running are Memory Fox, Roboform, and Java Console.

T Hodge, my freezes aren’t of the “FF is dead, have to kill it and restart” variety. It just locks up for a second or so. It’s enough to be annoying when you’re typing, clicking links, or watching video, but it doesn’t totally lock up the browser.

I installed Memory Fox yesterday. So far it seems to be working very well. With 14 tabs open FF is only using about 280MB (working set), and it releases memory quickly when I close a tab. Usually by now it would be up around 450-500MB.

I’m not sure but I think the freezes are better too. They’re still happening but they’re much shorter, maybe 1/4 sec or so. It’s really only noticeable when playing a video. But I’ve only been running it for less than a day. I’ll let it run a few days and see if it stays like this. If so, I could live with it.

Bob, yes I understand that. I generally end up rebooting at least once a week or so. Windows *ought* to be able to survive for 4-5 days without a reboot. (Ah for the good old days on Unix, when we ran servers for years at a time without reboots…)

Ted, yes, that’s where I changed my settings. But you can also right-click on a Flash player.

Ah, OK. Yes, I’d already done that, though through the adobe.com site rather than by right-clicking on a Flash window. But I didn’t set it up to 10MB. I’ve set it there now and I’ll see if it does anything.

But I don’t expect it will — because this is not a Flash-based problem. It’s Firefox. I can be doing something as simple as typing this message into the post window, or scrolling a web page, and Firefox still has its little fits.

FWIW my PC (laptop) is always “off” when not in use. But I sleep it or hibernate it. Sleep takes a negligible amount of standby power and hibernate takes none. But it saves me having to re-establish my work environment — just hit the button and it’s ready to go.

Did that (Secunia PSI) long ago. Other than a 9.x version of WinZip that’s listed as end-of-life, my system is clean. It’s *Firefox* that’s eating memory, not other apps.