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Vista regularly grinding to a halt


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I'm using Vista Home Basic on a 2.2GHz Athlon with 1024MB memory.

Every day after a few hours use it gets slower and slower and eventually becomes barely useable. Applications sometimes cannot even be shut down without a very long wait, necessitating a reboot.

The Task Manager (which itself takes minutes to start up) shows fairly light CPU usage but not much memory free. I guess Vista isn't managing memory very well.

My working set is usually two instances of Firefox, PaintShopPro, IrfanView, a text editor (PSPad), Skype, a dictionary (OED), and a word processor (OpenOffice). The same combination works fine on another, less capable, machine with XP.

Is this a common experience? Any way to fix it without installing XP?

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Was the machine built for Vista, or was it upgraded from XP? As with all upgrades there have been many problems with Vista. Personally, I would only use an operating system on a machine designed for it. :D

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Windows Vista is reputed to be a memory hog - much more so than XP.

The relatively large number of programs you have open and small amount of memory available (which may not be released after each process) could be the cause of this tardiness after the machine has been used for a time.

As a trial, experiment with using only one or two (maximum) programs open at a time to test whether the slowing down still occurs. If it does, the answer is to get more RAM installed.

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install Linux and finally be free...

Or with memory being so cheap at the moment buy another 1GB stick.

And if you have not done so already switch off the Aeroface, to free up some memory.

I didn't know that Home Basic had Aeroface - I thought it was restricted to Home Premium and Ultimate.

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