Windows XP forum: Windows XP errors

I thought it was a scam and so therefor told the caller there was no way I was going in and turning on my PC while he told me how to fix it, so my problems are not from there. Thanks for your feedback.

Glad you did not fall for the scam call.

Several possible causes:

--Your hard drive is getting too full.

--You are running out of free space on your main hard drive.

--You have a program you run that is damaged or corrupted.

--You are running a newer program that requires more memory on your system than you now have, for it to run properly, or it is maxing out the system memory when it is run.

Virtual memory is memory data that is written (stored) temporarily to your hard drive when Windows needs the space in system memory to run other tasks or programs at that moment. If that memory data can be moved to the hard drive when it is not being used in memory and newer data can be written to the memory space now freed, the computer is able to run the program you just started much more easily.

This process of moving memory data back and forth from the memory to hard drive and back to memory as needed is called swapping out and the space on the hard drive is called the "swap file".

Memory data can be run much faster than data can be read off the hard drive, so excessive use of the hard drive swap file will slow the system down noticeably, as reading and writing the memory data on the hard drive is much slower than running in memory.

This is something Windows decides and executes automatically.

Memory data can be only executed in memory; the hard drive is a place to store the data when it is not needed at that moment. This means that for the memory data to be used, it has to be read first, then placed in memory to be run, and if it is needed later, must be written back onto the hard drive.

Your system specifications will help greatly here if you wish to share them with us. Once we know what brand, model number, etc., we can better help you troubleshoot your system. If you tell us that, we will know if the age of the system could be a factor in what you are experiencing.

See the "Please read before posting" note below the text box you use in your reply, especially the part in red letters.

Thank you for the information about the virtual memory. I am happy to share more info with you but I don't know where to find any of these. I am a senior cit and although I can find my way around a PC pretty well I don't know very much about the working side of it. So if you can tell me how to find the info you need I will get back to you. Thank you once again

- For the amount of RAM in your PC, type MSINFO32 in your start run box and wait a few seconds. It's somewhere at the first page ("Total physical memory" or a comparable term)
- For the total and free disc space on the c:-drive, go to My Computer, right click on the c:-drive and choose properties. You'll see both the exact figures and a pie chart.
- For the virtual memory settings, see step 2 of http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308417. Don't change them!

It isn't too difficult, I hope.

Kees

Thank you so much. I will be able to do that and then I will post the answers.

I hope I have this right. Total Physical memory: 1024.50MB (doesen't seem much) C. Drive used space 13.5GB Free space 23.7GB Under Advance Tab, Virtual Memory, total paging file for all drives 1524MB. Then under general Tab. it had 3.06GHz 0.99GB of Ram Hope I got that right. Maybe now you can see some solution Thanks