Hello, My computer I just recently put together gets slow after a while of multitasking. When I check my Task Manager my physical memory usage looks high? Like right now, it says: Processes: 68 (a lot?) CPU usage 20% - 50%, sparingly jumps up high (normal right?) Physical Memory: 91% I'm running AMD Sempron 140 2.7GHz processor with 2GB DDR3 RAM on Windows 7 32-bit. However, only "1.75GB usable". Why is it that I can not utilize my 2GB of RAM? Looking at memory usage for each process at task, it looks like Google Chrome and Open Office take the biggest bite. I do a number of notetakings, writing, and webmastering - so I guess I"m "multitasking". Now I'm ok with computers, but not really :x:. To the point: I want to speed up my computer. Should I add two-more sticks of memory for a total of 4GB, or will this not be recognizable? Or would a dual-core processor help me? My motherboard is very modern (AM3 socket).
although windows 7 is great in comparison to vista, it still needs resources. a multicore cpu will improve multitasking greatly and more RAM - 4 gigs is the limit for a 32-bit system - will do so, too; the more the better in this case. about the CPU usage - if it jumps around from 20%-50% when you're having several applications open, it's ok, but if it's behaving like that when you have nothing open, it's wrong.
68 processes is to much, your system is page filing too much, swopping in and out of virtual memory and ram, the kernel deals with pageing data from the harddisk (pagefile.sys) to and from ram, if your running just a single disk you will notice your system crawl, if you using raid 0 with two disks or more you won't notice it as bad. you can fix this issue either by investing in more memory or customizing the amount of processes running in ram by using msconfig also services.msc from the run command. you can start by killing off useless processes and services, you can google for each process and service and find out if it's needed or not. if you want to go abit more advanced you can use the command prompt and enter the following: tasklist /svc this will list all the tasks running in memory also the svchost.exe and each services/.dll running on each svchost.exe, you can kill some of these .dll's off by using a program called process explorer can be downloaded via google. but watch out what your doing it's more for an advanced user. anyway good luck hope this helps.
For the meantime, try minimizing the system process by eliminating unnecessary applications during start up. Get rid of Yahoo Messenger, Skype , etc.
2nd this. You can use msconfig (type this in the Run box and hit OK) and look under the Startup tab to see what runs when you enter windows.
