Please help! I need some advice from my s2ki friends who are more IT savvy than me....Jonas, ralper, chazmo, zippy, etc

My email program (Outlook Express) has gotten very slow to load up and open new emails. Sometime I have to Ctl+Alt+Delete to get out and re-open the program. A recent popup message was "Searching Message for Hyperlinks" and also "Virtual Memory Too Low....see Help". Help explained about how Virtual Mem works but didn't tell me how to fix a slow response problem.

I have cleared my cookies and the temporary files....also deleted some of my larger filed emails with attachments. Btw, loading of webpages is not a problem....speed is still quite quick.

Any suggestions on diagnosis of this slow loading problem would be appreciated. Step by step instruction would be even better

 

Run your disc cleanup program which will delete temp files, etc. and then run your defrag program. You probably just need some cleaning work.

^^ Try those things first and be absolutely certain your av program is up to date. You may want to run your spybot search/destroy or whatever spyware program you have as well.

 

Thanks Val.....I hope that there are some more with ideas

 

I assume you have run your virus check?

 

If virtual memory is an issue, that means that your system is running out of memory, and needing to dump portions of memory to the hard drive to free up space for the running process. Since hard disks are so slow relative to RAM, this slows down the whole system.

1) How much RAM do you have installed? 512MB, 1GB, 2GB....
2) How much disk space is free on the C: drive? I prefer to leave about 20% of the disk free at a minimum.
3) Check the paging file size: Right click on My Computer, select Properties, select the Advanced Tab, then to to the Virtual Memory settings. The paging file should be set to at least 2x the installed RAM. Use 3x or 4x if you have the space, or if you only have 512MB.

JonasM

 

I had that problem until I realized that all the blocked addresses were causing it.

If you have a lot of blocked e mail addresses (spam,etc), the program has to scan all the incoming before it posts the new mail. That slows things way down.

 

Thanks for the cogent suggestions, Jonas......here are my findings:

1) 640 MB RAM (It's an HP/ Pentium III running M/S Windows XP- SP2)
2) C: drive has 24.4 GB free/ 37.2 GB total (65% free )
3) Virt Mem: Paging Size for all drives: 192MB

When I click on 'Change', the next page displays:
C: Initial 192- Maximum 384 (there's your 2X); boxes ready for changing these.
Available 25270 MB (not sure why this differs from the 24.4 above)
Min: 2 MB
Recommended: 958 MB
Current: 192 MB

Jonas-
Based on the above RAM and free space, should I change to 640 MB initial/ 1280 MB max; or did you mean (more likely) 1280 MB initial/ 1920 MB max [3X] or 2560 MB max [4x]

Btw, based on Val's suggestion I also Defragged which seemed to clean up the profile a lot; had done this only around Thanksgiving....but maybe it was interrupted and not done completely

I update my spybot (AD-aware-SE) pretty often; and av (McAfee) is updated automatically....seems every day or so. I also go into the Control Panel and delete the Cookies & Temp Files at least once per month....seems to work.

 

I haven't directly blocked many email addresses, but thanks for trying to help, Bat I think Jonas step-by-step** might be the magic bullet.....once I get his further answer on the settings.

**It might be something that others would also benefit from checking. It's a pretty simple protocol.....if I could figure it out

 

With that configuration it really should be 2048 MB minimum.

Now you seem to have the space available on your harddrive, so personally, I would maybe even set it to 4096 MB and use that value for both the maximum and minimum to get a static virtual memeory file. Especially if your harddrive is not the fastest, you can speed things up a little if the virtual memory file is not constantly resizing while running your programs.

 

With plenty of space in the drive, setting it to 4GB min and max should make sure that there's always plenty of space for a swap file.

Better yet, if you can get your hands on a space 2-8 GB hard drive, install it and put your swap file there. These drives are too small for most uses, so you may find someone who will give one to you. That way, if the swap file sis the only thing on the drive, it won't get fragmented, which is another reason for slowdowns, as you found out.

JonasM