Memory Leak

[StraightPipe]

My brother gave me his PC because it's acting crazy 😉

He lives on a dorm network, and has had continual problems with viruses, mcafee was crapping out, and his system pretty much wouldnt run.

so I dropped a 30Gb drive in the box, boot from it, and installed a new windows OS (XP pro) . no service packs or updates.

the box hasnt been on the net yet, so im thinking no possible infections.

after running for a few hours explorer.exe begins to use 100's of megs, and eventually eats up all the memory, and starts writing a page file. at that point the system pretty much halts due to the constant writing of the page file, and lack of memory.

system:
Gateway
2.6Ghz P4c
512MB RAM
30GB WD
80GB WD
120GB Maxtor

any ideas?

 

[RussianSoldier]

is this by any chance LongHorn Build 4015? If so, it's known to have a memory leak, use a different version...

Since it's a fresh install, I'd rule out any possiblity of corrupt drivers, and since it's not on the net, it's not the temporary internet files

Some people report that explorer eats their memory when a hard drive or cdrom is failing. Is all your hardware in good condition? Try removing all but one hard drive...

 

[spyordie007]

I'm guessing he is not running Longhorn; assuming I'm correct my money is on Viruses, Spyware and/or Adware.

 

[StraightPipe]

XP pro.

could i be having probs with viruses even though it hasnt been on net. (ie: left over on another drive, even though the other drives arent being acessed)