As far as the Virtual Memory issue...if you have WinXP or Windows 2000, right-click your My Computer icon and choose "Properties". In the advanced settings, set your Virtual Memory to be 1.5 times the amount of your physical memory. Use this amount for the minimum and the maximum, and it will keep Windows from trying to change your swap space allocation size. (This is Microsoft's recommendation)

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When the machine slows down, hit Control-Alt-Delete, start the Windows Task Manager, and look at the Processes tab. Click on the Mem Usage column to make it sort according to that parameter; what "image names" are using the most memory? Anything you don't recognize? Do the same with the CPU column.

Do you run anti-spyware/adware programs in addition to your antivirus? If not, try Spybot and Ad-Aware. (I tried to link to them, but it's causing everything else to be truncated; you can find them both easily with Google)

Edited by - Harri Patel on 9/3/2006 10:25:11 PM

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I do have the latest ad-bloc, and all I can say is that it appears to coincide - but I can't be sure...and yes, I use Spy-bot and SpySweeper

Edited by - jagnla on 9/12/2006 2:04:15 AM

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Back with firefox 1.0 I had similar problems. When I checked task manager I found Firefox. exe was using a huge amount of memory and it kept growing the more I browsed.

Once I closed firefox (I may have had to kill it in task manager) and restarted it browsing went back to normal for a while. But the problem always came back.

Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the extension that I figured was the problem. I've since reduced my reliance on extensions and only use Download Manager Tweak, Tabbrowser Preferences, IE View Lite and DownThemAll.

If firefox is up to date I suggest you uninstall Adblock to see if that clears up the sluggishness.

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Thanks, Igor! Much obliged.

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If XP doesn't have a way of doing it automatically, perhaps you can "cheat" by setting the swap-file size to 0 (unless someone else here thinks this would be unsafe), reboot, defragment drive and set swap-file size to the fixed size again.
Or possibly even better: making a dedicated partition on your hard-drive if and when you do a complete XP re-install.

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Where would I find that?

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PS - I installed Adblock but ended up disabling it because it was really slowing Firefox down.

Edited by - hardware on 9/12/2006 1:32:32 PM

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Where would I find that?

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You can find it at:

C:\pagefile.sys

But I'm not sure that Windows will let you defrag it, since it is almost constantly in use. You may have to find a third-party utility. I've actually never tried to defrag it. I just hacked my registry to dump it every time I shut down. It makes the shutdown time longer, but I don't have to worry what is lingering around if people that know what they are doing start to snoop around. I don't remember the Microsoft Knowledge Base article number off of the top of my head, but I'm sure that you can google it.

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