Upgrading for windows 7

My pc seems to be struggling with Win 7, memory fairly maxed out and fans going nuts...

Any suggestions - I'm assuming memory first though quite what though.


PSU Corsair HX 620W ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 2.40GHz
Abit IP35 Pro (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel Kit


Any thoughts?

Having only 2GB of slow RAM is not helping ... everything else looks purdy good.

... Turn off drive indexing and look for a "Win7 Performance Tweaks" document, online ... VideoGuys.com had one for XP-Pro.

= Al =

will do

cheers

It was fine with XP, fine with everything really. Not sure if its a cooling thing but the memory needs upping anything, will see that if that's a problem.

Another 2 gig same spec? or can I upgrade it....?

No gaming as yet... it's just general use, especially when playing media or streaming, free memory is pretty much down to 0 so I can only assume that the main problem...

Unless there is something other stuff running in the background?

noted...

is 4 going to be enough..?

Oh, yes! . . . 4GB is "Good-n-Plenty ! ".

= Al =

More of the same ... best investment.

Also what he said.

Would still like to know what's happening on the system. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on 2GB of RAM and not having any issues:



This with a full virus scan and a movie streaming from my network at the same time. Still sitting at 1.18GB of RAM usage. Kicking off a YouTube stream still only brings me up to 1.22 GB RAM usage. Something is definitely not right with the OPs system.

-Wolf sends

Well ... Can't argue with real life ... I'd give wolf a good listen and see if he can help you out. Could be you won't need any more RAM at all .. (sure wouldn't hurt) ...

... Maybe he can discover the root cause and that *MAY NOT * be all about RAM ... Netbooks do it ... you *should* be able to. (after all that).

= Al =

Well, if Wolfie has any more to say about what to try ... I'd have a listen. I really don't care *what* he's doing if it does not fix the OPs issue, tho.


= Al =

Even trying to duplicate London's system usage, I could only get my memory usage up to 1.22 GB. I installed VLC and copied a vob file from my network to my local system. Next I started a movie stream from Netflix to simulate streaming London's streaming from TVCatchup. I also tried a stream from HULU for comparison. Since the provided image did not show the task bar, I couldn't see what else might be running. The only other app I have running is Mozilla Thunderbird.

London - If you haven't run any type of anti-spyware/malware program recently, that's the first thing I'd do. Just make sure your system isn't doing anything it's not supposed to be doing. Programs I'd recommend are:

Housecall from TrendMicro
Ad-Aware from Lavasoft
Spybot: Search and Destroy from Safer Networking
Malwarebytes from Malwarebytes.org

If you haven't run any of these (all are free), I'd try at least two.

Next reboot your system. When it comes back up and before you start any programs, check your memory usage. On a fresh boot, my systems starts out at 1.08GB of RAM used. Included in my startup are:

DynDNS
ATI Catalyst Control Center
MagicJack
AVG Free

If your system reports clean (no spy/mal-ware, no virus/trojan) and immediately after reboot your system still reports well over 1GB of RAM in use, then I'd ask what programs you have running in your startup.

It may very well be that the answer to your issue *IS* buy more ram. As Alvin says, it won't hurt, but me being a "soon to be out of work techie", my first answer can't be "throw money at it".

So please run the scans, reboot your system and report back your memory usage after reboot and what programs are starting at boot time.

-Wolf sends

Edit:

On a side note, there are significant differences between London's system and mine. Alvin and Dmitry: If either of you have systems closer to the specs of London's (Windows 7 64 bit/Quad-Core/hefty graphics card) could you also reboot your systems (mine's offline at the moment) and report back memory usage and start up applications? Thanks!

Looking at your processes, most of them are not running on my system:

GoogleTalk
TeaTimer
iType
MozyBackup
Mindmanager Reminder
iTunes manager

All non-essential unless you actually use these programs. If you know what each of these are and actually use them, then by all means, get more ram. If you don't know what they are and never use them, uninstall them from control panel add/remove programs. Then see if your system is more responsive.

-Wolf sends

Actually with everything disabled via msconfig wotnot I'm at 1.12Gb used...

I'm pretty sure all ATOMs have 64 bit Support ... all the recent ones . . . N320+


= Al =