What causes this type of slowdown?

[Greenwald]

Guys,

Lately I've been doing a bunch of graphics work on my home PC (for work). I am using Macromedia Fireworks. After some time my PC gets slower and slower. It never locks up or anything, but I should have plenty of HP to cruise through the graphics I'm working on. I've noticed in general that the PC's been getting slower. I'm doing a defrag now with Diskeeper. Can anyone list 10 common factors (or suggest a link or software analyzer) that generally cause PC slowdown? Is it possible that the graphics work is filling up the ram? I routinely run spybot and JV16 registry tools. My specs are below:

P4 2.53G 400FSB
Epox 4G4A+
1G RAM PC 2700 Samsung
XP Home
Video: Leadtek GeForce4 MX w/128mb
Audio: Phillips Seismic Edge
HD's: 30G Maxtor 1/2 full (main drive)
200G WD only 17G free (hmmm might be a concern, huh?)
120G WD 35G free

The last two above drives are in removable trays. I store video (for editing) on removable drives.

Any help appreciated,

M Greenwald

 

[mechBgon]

You might easily be exceeding your RAM, I blew through over 700MB just editing a scanned signature for a co-worker the other day. What's the peak commit charge showing after a session?

Also, good antivirus software will be trying to check out files that are saved to the hard drive. Big files = heavy work for the antivirus scanner. You may want to consider disabling it if that's safe in your situation.

 

[Greenwald]

MechBgone,

Thank you for the suggestions. I will check out the peak commit charge when I work on graphics next. Also, this machine does not have an Anti-Virus package. My 200G drive only has 8% space avail, so maybe that's slowing me down some, and it turns out my main drive was fairly fragmented. Can you list a site (or software) that outlines steps to go through to optimize PC operation/speed?

Thanks
Greenwald

 

[ThatDumbGuy]

There could also possibly be a memory leak in the program?

If you are concerned with general optimization, I would recommend a few excellent guides on Tweaktown, these two in particular:


WinXP Tweaking: From Reformat to Relax
WinXP Tweaking: From Relax to Righteous

Also, another good site to check out is Blackviper's website, pay particular attention to what the services in WinXP do.

Best of luck!