Number 234 - October 2002

Slow Leak?
from Bruce Preston's column in Danbury PCUG's dacs.doc
Q. My PC gets slower as the day goes on. How do I determine what is causing it to slow down, and how do I fix it? If I restart the machine, it works fine. I am running Windows 2000 .     A. What you describe is a classic case of memory leakage. An application obtains memory from the system it uses it to perform its tasks and but doesn't release the memory back to the system when it is finished. As a result, the system eventually runs out of RAM and has to make use of virtual memory on the	disk, causing a performance problem. On Windows 2000 you can go to the performance monitor (Ctrl-Alt-Del) page before you start an application, and record the amount of available RAM. Then start and run one of your applications as normal. Then close the application and examine the available memory again--if it hasn't returned to where it was, you found the application with the memory leak. Follow-up questioning showed that you typically run PhotoShop, Notes, and Acrobat--all are complex programs, and all have had patch releases to repair memory leaks. Go to their respective sites and download the latest patches.
Number 234 - October 2002