Urgent Help Please: RAM Upgrade Seems to Slow Things Down

My drive is partitioned into C, D and E. It's NTFS and it MUST be defragmented reularly especially D where my realtime data is.. After 1 week I get 60% plus defragmentation: saving data in real time efficiently is NOT XP Pro's forte it would appaear.

You should also use CLEANDISK (System Tools) and get rid of all old files/downloads etc.. as you have probably accumulated loads of u/s carp...
 
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Thanks for all the suggestions so far and let me clarify a few things:

I have XP Pro with the Norton firewall and antivirus on all the time. Being a paranoid, I also have the free AVG virus software and the XP firewall on as well since I cannot affect to be infected by anything. This set up worked fine before I had the RAM upgrade and the 2 new monitors linked. So I am not sure if it's a coincidence or not.

My hard drives are NTFS and being a 4 month old machine, it has lots of hard disk space left and I just did a defrag a week ago just to be safe. I slowed down the hardware accelration this morning and it didn't really make much difference. I have just done a freeRAM pro cleanup but I don't know if it works or not as the markets are now closed, so the IG data refresh rate is very low in any case.

When the IG page is on, the Task Manager CPU graph oscillate between 30 and 100% most of the time, it goes up and stays at 100% throughout when I have other applications on. I have noticed the IG page can start off with 30Mb'ish then going up to 50+Mb.

When I tried to use the Sun Java, IG asked me to leave the last of the MS Java box checked rather than having everything unchecked. The way it sucks all the memory when IG is loaded led me to think it's more to do with memory or cache sharing, or temp folders getting choked up, but I have set IE6 to automatically delete all the temp internet files when closing down, so I don't know where else the memory drain can be.

I had the "virtual memory running low" message coming up every now and then before the RAM upgrade(hence the upgrade), and I originally set the VM paging file size to be 3Gb, but I switched back to "system allocated" as someone told me it would be slower than using just the RAM.

Regarding whether the new RAM is compatible, it's made by Kingston specifically for this particular Dell model, and it's the same model that one can get on the Dell web site. BTW, if you ever need to upgrade your Dell RAM, their own brand product seems to be twice as expensive as their approved suppliers'. They didn't have the Kingston one in stock, and I ended up buying it from DABS at a 25% discount(may be that's why it doesn't work!).

Normal web browsing and Microsoft applications seem to be running fine, so this is a bit of a puzzle to me.
 
Try disabling Norton but leave AVG and Sygate running. There may be a conflict. Some say that Norton screws things up.
You'll be OK with the other 2. Nothing's got me yet :cheesy:
 
Well I run NAV and Norton Personal Firewall and XP Pro Firewall and am behind a wireless firewall as well.. so it can't be those.

Try totall unchecking the MS VM .. if needed you can always reset it. IG works well with Sun Java only and no MS VM.. (and IB and CityIndex and MIRC and IE6 and Linnsoft IRt and OE Autotrader which is also a Java application).

Regarding VM let the system decide: the perceived wisdom is that VM should be no bigger than 2x main memory.. I dad VM running low until I changed to let the system decide..

I really can't think of anything else except to ask: do you start up your programs in the same sequence? If yes try altering the order..
 
Could well be the AV software.

I would try disabling all the AV software and both firewalls initially (You should never run two concurrent firewalls in any case!!! Just one good one. For most Broadband users a simple NAT device is fine).

This will take AV and firewalls out of the equation.

If things are still slow I would uninstall Suns JAVA and reinstall another Sun JAVA but a different version. i.e. Upgrade or Downgrade.

PS the NATCHI virus will massively slow down network apps like Web Browsers etc. Your virus definitions are up to date (full scan carried out) and the machine Windows Updated?

HTH

JonnyT
 
As my problems only started to happen after the new RAM and the extra 2 monitors, I disenabled the 2 new monitors today and the speed seemed to pick up quite a lot. I then enabled the 3rd monitor and it seemed ok for most of the time as well until the very end when it locked up again. I therefore suspect it’s got to do how the CPU allocates its time to the different applications on the different monitors.

The same charting application had approx. 50Mb used up in a 2 monitor setup, it went up to approx. 70Mb in a 3 monitor setup and then went to 100Mb in a 4 monitor setup.

The 4 monitor set up is fine when it's not busy, e.g. noon, but when the IG refresh rate goes up, e.g. 3pm or 8pm, the various web applications then start to eat up CPU memory.

I will try to take the RAM out over the weekend, but won't be able to test it properly as there will be no high volume data flow.

Pretty intriguing.
 
It sounds like your system is being swamped by trying to display the immense amount of changing data on your monitors. This may help: Go to your monitor Display Properties menu (right-click on desktop--choose Properties). Under the Effects tab (Windows2000 here) UNCHECK "Smooth edges of screen fonts". That could take a lot of load off your graphics system. I'm assuming you've got lots of textual data constantly updating. Hope that helps. Peter

ps

Have you spent time on the Matrox website? Do you have the most recent drivers? (They don't neccesarily ship the most recent versions with the graphics cards.) Get Matrox tech support to try and help you as well.

Your system sounds fantastically fast so you should be able to handle just about anything with that Xeon chip.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions to date.
I have now tried using just the old RAM(512Mb), just the new RAM(1Gb) and they don't seem to make much difference, ie still gets 100% CPU usage most of the time. Therefore I don't think it's the new RAM which is causing the problem.
What made some difference was to uncheck the option for showing the image of the whole web page/screen when dragging it along, which seems to be quite power hungry. Decreasing the colour quality from 32bit to 16 bit also helped. However, my setup should be able to cope with this type of page refreshing as it's much less demanding than playing video images.
I suspect it has got to do with the Java setting or the way the PC drives the quad card.
I was a little bit upset to find out the Matrox quad card is 32Mb in all(rather than 32 Mb per screen output), and I found out the price difference was only about £120-150(although Dell didn't have the higher spec as a choice). In any case, this lower spec card is used by a lot of financial institutions so it should not cause this problem. I am wondering if it causes a problem if the CPU and the RAM are too fast for the graphics card. I will try to ask Matrox Support if they know of any problems.
 
I have just had a similar kind of conversation with a friend (over the internet) who was having major problems with delays in his charting software - 3-4 seconds late versus his Interactive Brokers prices.

After weeks and weeks, he gave up and reloaded all his software from scratch..


And surprise : he now has no lag..

You may have to do the same and it's cheaper than buying new hardware..
 
Chartman, I found this:

It was actually MS that caused fragmentation in the first place. The original NTFS without compression was great, no fragmentation at all. When they introduced compression into the system, the compression engine caused massive problems for both uncompressed and compressed files.

here http://www.dirms.com/

Thought it might interest you
 
Infobull. Just a hunch but going back to the first para of your first post suggests you had a problem with a configuration that should have been fine. Browser or other settings? - who knows. If so it is still there but camouflaged by whatever it is your upgrade is doing. Apologies for giving every assistance short of actual help.

Oatman. Useful link. Maybe I'll bin Diskeeper.

Regards
 
K
Don't be in too much of a hurry to bin diskeeper. Look at how many files you have on your hard drive(s). I have over 70,000. The DIRMS page talks of several days to do a complete defrag with several thousand files. If several equates to three then I have 23x several files and thefore might be looking at 23x3 ie 69 days to defrag!!!! Or am I missing something here?
 
I have just over 80,00 files. A full defrag takes just over 15 minutes..
Time depends on disk size, and file fragmentation. The bigger both are the longer it takes...
 
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