Windows 7 - Memory

DorsetDude

DorsetDude

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Hi
I have a Medion PC from Aldi, bought a year or so back. It is running Windows 7 64 bit. It has 4gb memory in.
But it takes forever to do anything - loading up the browser, email, Elements etc, it is forever chuntering away at the hard disk and the mouse is unresponsive etc. I wonder if 4Gb is enough memory for it? As its probably out of warranty after a year I could perhaps open it up and put some more in.

Think it'll help a lot?

Is memory expensive these days?

Thanks
 
4gb is plenty for Win7, I'd suspect that it's software related. Possibly the HDDs full or some sort of Malware running and taking up system resources.

I have a PC which is coming up for over 2 years old running Win7 64 bit. The only times it slows down is when it's rendering video and I try to do something else as well. It'll happily deal with all my usual tasks, Word Processing, Excel etc. Outlook for email and half a dozen tabs open in Firefox and be batch processing in Photoshop in the background. I never even think about the speed under those circumstances. Although I may upgrade the memory in order to help speed up batch processing as my image files are never going to get smaller.
With no photoshop running, my CPU usage is <5% and physical memory usage in the mid 30%s.
 
Memory isn't expensive and you probably can upgrade it, but 4G is enough for most things. Sounds like you have some unwanted programs clogging up memory that are probably doing nothing. So...

What processor is in it?

What does the Performance tab in the Task Manager (right click on the taskbar and Start Task Manager). In particular, what do the Physical Memory (MB) figures say?
 
hi

thanks for replies, its my home computer and Im not there at the moment. Will check and report back probably tomorrow.
I was infected with a virus a while back but got it cleared with the help of one of the members in here. May be something is lingering that was missed.
 
Have you cleaned out the temp files. Windows is very good at storing unneeded bits, in many different places.
 
Reinstalling windows for potentially one program that's hogging resources is way ott.

Like andy said check task manager for the CPU and or memory usage being high then check to see if it's a particular process using it all.
 
Did it come pre installed with loads of bloatware like McAffee or Norton?
 
Stratman said:
Did it come pre installed with loads of bloatware like McAffee or Norton?
Click to expand...

Norton has not been bloat ware for years now. If you look at the specs and reviews it has a very small footprint on both RAM and CPU usage.

I have NIS 2012 running on my laptop and it does what it says on the box.
 
Aldi have a 3 year warranty on computers.
 
It could be doing indexing all the while, you can turn that off, or leave it running overnight to complete it.
4GB is ample to run very fast, even with resource hogs like photoshop open there should be loads of spare capacity.
 
4wd said:
It could be doing indexing all the while, you can turn that off, or leave it running overnight to complete it.
4GB is ample to run very fast, even with resource hogs like photoshop open there should be loads of spare capacity.
Click to expand...

Could be that, especially if a lot of data has been put on the machine recently
 
I'm a great believer in a periodic "wipe & reinstall".

This works fine if you have a set of "retail" W7 DVDs but I'd imagine it could be a problem for systems supplied with the dreaded "restore" disc as this will basically reinstall all the extra rubbish that the manufacturer decided to "bundle".

I make it a policy to only ever order "os free" hardware and then install my own OS using the "retail" windows discs.
 
Especially if you are running a pre loaded bloated version.

I reinstall windows once a year and I always notice the difference. For the record I'm not the sort to install this, that and the other all over the machine.

Not just for the problem you've stated, I'd back up and reinstall.
 
4Gb is plenty for W7 64bit.

As above I would backup and re-install

If you still have a problem after that then it could be the drive on its way out
 
I had an aldi medion that used to do that (ref the OP).

Lots of disc thrashing and slow to open things. Maybe its just something in the way its set up. I remember turning off indexing etc to try and settle it down and there was nothing obvious causing it in task manager.

I wiped and re installed in the end using a windows disc and not a built in restore. All the drivers were on the hard drive in a folder as supplied from Medion so just copied that off and used it after the new install. ran fine after the new install.
 
Gary Coyle said:
Maybe not necessary but it works
Click to expand...

Yeah, like I say if you install and uninstall rubbish all the time. Same thing happens with macs.

If its really necessarily then its odd how the 40 or so 7 boxes at work don't require regular reinstalls.. But then they're locked down so the users can't cock them up :)
 
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arad85 said:
Memory isn't expensive and you probably can upgrade it, but 4G is enough for most things. Sounds like you have some unwanted programs clogging up memory that are probably doing nothing. So...

What processor is in it?

What does the Performance tab in the Task Manager (right click on the taskbar and Start Task Manager). In particular, what do the Physical Memory (MB) figures say?
Click to expand...

here is the resource monitor before Ive opened any programs, just the desktop there after booting:
ResMon.jpg


With firefox now open and about 10 tabs, none of which are video or anything
Task manager shows 4096 Total memory (MB)
Cached 1641
Available 2232
Free 659

Cpu usage flicks between 0%, 1% and up to 12or13% sporadically.

Not sure how I found out what processor is installed under windows 7.

Thanks
 
RobertP said:
I wiped and re installed in the end using a windows disc and not a built in restore. All the drivers were on the hard drive in a folder as supplied from Medion so just copied that off and used it after the new install. ran fine after the new install.
Click to expand...

Cheers. Could be the answer, but I dont have the OS disks, or want the hassle to be honest, oh well.
 
Just out of interest, try firing up another web browser instead of Firefox and see how it performs.

I have seen Firefox kill many a machine in the past, both PC and Mac.
 
DorsetDude said:
With firefox now open and about 10 tabs, none of which are video or anything
Task manager shows 4096 Total memory (MB)
Cached 1641
Available 2232
Free 659
Click to expand...
In which case, more memory is not going to help as you are only using 1.6G.

DorsetDude said:
Not sure how I found out what processor is installed under windows 7.
Click to expand...
Control Panel->System
 
4wd said:
svchost is going mental, does this seem worth trying?
http://www.technibble.com/how-to-fix-svchost-using-100-cpu-memory-leak/
Click to expand...

id suggest not for the OP, that seems to be a fix for high CPU usage whereas this seems to be disk activity.

svchost using disk resource could be anything - background defrag, indexing, it could also be your antivirus doing its on access/background scanning (which would make sense as its not doing any writes). it could also be the old superfetch doing its caching.
 
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Ploddles said:
Just out of interest, try firing up another web browser instead of Firefox and see how it performs.

I have seen Firefox kill many a machine in the past, both PC and Mac.
Click to expand...
The sys res image I posted was before Id started firefox.

arad85 said:
In which case, more memory is not going to help as you are only using 1.6G.

Control Panel->System
Click to expand...
AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0Ghz

Bullysrus said:
Do you use AV, if so which
Click to expand...
Avast free version
 
Have you tried Neils suggestion? There is something running that is causing lots of disk access. Unfortunately, svchost is a generic wrapper for a number of system tools so we need more details to figure out what it is that's causing this.

The processor is good enough to run things quite quickly (my home server uses a Athlon II x64 630 which is about 8% slower than yours and it's perfectly capable of running stuff at a reasonable speed).
 
Yes ive downloaded proc explorer, rebooted the machine and fired it up. Didnt have a clue what I was looking at then though. Just a load of rows and columns highlighted pink, no idea what they all meant. :(

ProcExp.jpg
 
Right click on the header line -> select columns->Process Disk and select read bytes. Sort by read bytes and see what is reading the disk. Always assuming that you still have lots of reads from the disk in Task Manager
 
if the harddisk get above 50% it realy starts to slow down. if this is the case ,
delete unwanted programs and files , and move any photo , music that you dont need at the moment to an external device , Hard disk or dvd


Cheers Steve
 
steve_lyt said:
if the harddisk get above 50% it realy starts to slow down. if this is the case ,
delete unwanted programs and files , and move any photo , music that you dont need at the moment to an external device , Hard disk or dvd

Cheers Steve
Click to expand...

50%? People normally state 80-90%
 
It'll only really slow down if it runs out of pagefile/temp space....95%+. If the drive is well used and fairly full it's likely to be quite fragmented. Running a defrag overnight is certainly not going to do any harm, especially as there's probably a clonky old 5400 rpm drive in there.
 
Go into MSConfig, disable every item in the startup tab. Bang, fast computer again.
 
trencheel303 said:
Go into MSConfig, disable every item in the startup tab. Bang, fast computer again.
Click to expand...
Well... not every one. Some are useful ;)

The svchost will probably be started from the services tab though.
 
any useful startup item will force itself to start regardless of what MSConfig says. Useful in my book covers very little though - AV and not much else.

Killing services doesn't make much difference; most services just sit idle and don't take up any (measurable) CPU power. The only reason I generally turn off services is to stop an annoying routine or to plug security holes... like the task scheduler in older systems which had a habit of opening TCP port 135 (DCOM) wide to the world and the Messenger service which was an invite for spam.
 
trencheel303 said:
any useful startup item will force itself to start regardless of what MSConfig says.
Click to expand...
msconfig manipulates the registry, so if you disable it in msconfig, it is disabled - unless the program checks at shutdown.

Just looked at mine, and I have quite a few things in there - none of which I want to switch off and most of which I put there (alternative window managers, task switcher, hotkey interceptor etc...)

The OP is having a problem with svchost though, which will probably be being started by the services section.... but having said that he hasn't posted here for a couple of days - perhaps everything is back to normal.
 
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