Page 1 of Page file usage - its always high!

OK. So I know this has something to do with memory and how much is being used but, what I dont understand is why its always running pretty high when the PC is doing nowt!? I have upped it in the past but it just keeps running high and it takes the PC and age to do something ESPECIALLY if I want to watch a media file.
I have ad-aware Pro, Sygate Firewall and AVG and its says Im clean. Any ideas what, if any, problem I have here?

What OS are you using? And how much physical ram do you have?

You need to remember that Windows is an incredibly bloated OS, with a system that involves hundreds of DLLs that all have to be loaded into memory even though just one function might be used in them.

Editor
DVD REVIEWER

"The Green Belt policy is a Labour Policy, and we intend to Build on it"
John Prescott

XP SP2. 256meg RAM. It never used to be this high, its only since I installed that cancer research and Mozilla Firefox that its gone all slow. I run the research in screensaver mode only.

Quote:
its only since I installed that cancer research....

That`ll be the reason it`s running high. It did the same to me, running a PIII 800Mhz with 256MB RAM. I now only let it run over night when I am not using it for anything else. Take it out of your startup menu.

Sam.

You should up your ram as well by at least another 256mb. It`s because you don`t have much ram the system is being forced to use page files. The more ram you have the less any page file `ram` is needed.

To free more sytem resources read this thouroghly and then apply the appropriate services config if you feel confident...

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/registry.htm

That website make no sense to me. Guess Im a PC idiot! Cant up the RAM anymore so I just adjusted the research prog to run at night only.

Upping your RAM to 512mb is the best thing you can do, XP/2K/NT barely fit in 256mb as it is, before you even launch an application. :/

Look up your motherboard (or PC if its branded) on http://www.crucial.com/uk/index.asp and you should be able to see what it would cost.

You may have to replace all the RAM, but its the only real solution.

Editor
DVD REVIEWER

"The Green Belt policy is a Labour Policy, and we intend to Build on it"
John Prescott

Its a laptop. Had 128meg built on the board so I was told I could only put another 128meg card in the one open slot or else it wouldn`t work.