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I am troubleshooting one of my lab computers (a netvista workstation). The windows xp install has gone very very slow and is making the machine crawl after about 40 mins or so after startup. Sometimes this happens after an hour, sometimes after 2 hours. Doing a reinstall is out of the question, too many important programs running on it for which we currently don't have installation disks. I tried to use Task manager and later Process Explorer to see what is causing the sudden memory hogging, but have not had any luck yet. System is behind a firewall and there seem to be no viruses/spyware (I did an extensive check).

I was wondering if anyone knows a good (free) memory usage monitoring program. Of course it should not be heavy itself I am specfically looking for a "widget" kind of program that can run on top of all other programs, and that has a graphical output of memory usage (pie chart, regular graph like the tast manager etc) - i.e something that I don't have to look at all the time, but if there is a spike or anything, I won't miss it if I am working on something else.

Is any such program available? Any info is appreciated.

FreeMem Pro does a decent job. I keep mine in the System tray as a number. It can be set to monitor and alert when memory falls below a set point. The program does a decent job. There is a free version that can tell you about memory; there is a paid version that can assist managing memory by removing old applications from memory.

Be alert to one other possibilty: The hard drive may have gone into PIO mode. That will slow things down as well.
... JDH

JDH, thanks for the info, will check it out tomorrow. Will keep in mind to check the HDD going into PIO mode too - any reason why it might go to PIO mode after a few hours after boot? AFAIK, there was no power settings (or any other, for that matter) on the workstation that would set this behavior ...

I have TweakRAM which I got free from http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/
Normally it's $20 or something. Their homepage is http://www.elcor.net/tram.php

Maybe it's very much like FreeMem Pro mentioned above.

Another thought would be to run CCleaner

http://www.ccleaner.com/features.aspx

Especially the registry fix if XP been running for a long time.

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