I have a P3 866 with 512 MB RAM. I have a few gigs of hard drive space free on both drives C & D.I just restarted my computer and closed all programs but my hardware drivers, etc. and I right clicked on my computer and went to properties and it's showing 64% memory free.

The problem is, if I run a few programs at once, like photoshop, internet explorer, winamp, and frontpage, sometimes I'll get a warning that I don't have enough resources. Other times certain programs will freeze and crash altogether, or windows explorer will crash. Also, every once in a while, during a game of Warcraft 3 the entire computer will freeze for no apparent reason and force me to hit the restart button on the tower.

Any help would be much appreciated. Someone once suggested specifying my own virtual memory settings instead of letting Windows manage it, but I'm not sure what to set these to. I also did a quick ctrl-alt-del to see what was running, and there are about 20-25 programs running, and I have no clue what they are.

 

What OS are you running? Sounds an awful lot like Win98, in which case I'd venture that the operating system is your problem.

 

Win 98

So, Windows ME would be the way to go?

 

Thats your problem right there. Win98 is garbage, even worse with large amounts of ram (>384MB).

Upgrade to Win2K or XP. The memory management is much better for the apps you're running.

 

Try removing some of those programs:

http://www.techexplained.com/answered/7.php

 

i don't know if you have a feature called "Disk Defragmenter." you might want to try and do that. i'm not sure if it will help your situation but everytime i defragment my computer it runs a lot faster.

 

Stay away from ME. I've heard it's even worse than 98. Go with XP. Much more stable and if it works great on my p3 550 with 512 MB RAM then it should work fine on your faster computer.

 

Well I took the advice of my father and I'm sticking with Win 98 - However I did go through my ctrl-alt-del list and closed just about every program I didn't need and that freed my memory up to 80% free. I also haven't defragged in a very long time so I'll have this going overnight. Thanks for everyone's time with this.

 

WinME blows monkey nuts. XP is quite stable...I run it at home on a p2-400 and it works...it should be just fine on your p3-866. win2k would work as well and consumes less resources than XP...if you can get ahold of a copy.

 

Windows ME is horrilbe , I had it . I changed to 2K pro , like a new computer .. just my .02