Me problems...severe lack of resources

[Bycin]

I came back from a small vacation yesterday and my computer seemed to be working fine. Went to bed and noticed upon waking that my system had frozen during the night. I rebooted, and everything appeared to load normally. Tried open up IE, and nothing happened. No window appeared at all. Tried again and same thing happened. On the third try I got the message that my system was dangerously low on resources and I should terminate "Explorer". I clicked ok, and everything froze.

Restarted, everything appeared normal until I tried opening up IE again and repeated the same issue. Ran spybot, ad-aware, mcafee, did a scan disk, all of which turned up nothing wrong. Decided to do a system restore, hoping it would fix things but it didn't. At this point, regardless of what I try and open, nothing happens other than a system freeze and occassionally a low resources message.

Can anyone help? I'm stumped...

[Landon]

Press Control-Alt-Delete on your keyboard, it should open a small window, everything you see running here is what is running in the background, they all eat up memory and cause your System Resources to go lower and lower until you start seeing errors like the ones that you have been gettings.

Chances are you have probably had a few programs crashing also for no apparent reason. To view what your System Resources currently are right click My Computer and then left click Properties, then click the Advanced tab, your resources should be listed there.

I personally do not like them to be below 80%, if a user wants them below this I usually suggest that they get more memory or unacceptable things usually start happening.

Anyway, back to the CLOSE window, the only two things that absolutely have to be running in here are SYSTRAY and EXPLORER, one at a time hi-lite something and then click on the ENDTASK button, sometimes it takes 30 seconds or so for something to respond, ENDTASK it when it gives you the chance to.

Keep doing this until everything except SYSTRAY and EXPLORER are gone, then click the CANCEL button and check your System Resources again, if you are lucky it might shoot up to 94 to 96%.

But... as soon as you reboot everything will come back leaving you back where you were with low resources. Two easy suggestions that I will give and then give your brain a chance to rest are:

1 - Click the START button then go to PROGRAMS, look for a folder called STARTUP, anything that you do not need to auto-load itself can be right clicked and deleted. Two common ones that are found here are OSA and FINDFAST.

2 - You probably have a ton of icons in the SYSTRAY next to the clock in the lower right hand corner, anything that you do not need running or don't mind manually opening yourself and be right clicked, there is usually a PROPERTIES or SETTINGS option that you can choose, then there is usually a check box for whether or not you want it to run in the SYSTRAY.

Good luck, hope this helped!

[Bycin]

Thanks for the help, Landon. I'll give this a try and see how it helps :)