Very Old Computer Being used 24/7

[Joris]

Hi, soo i recently came up with an idea to invest 10$ and get my old Pc running with a system of a motherboard: octek rhino kt 266 a/ ASE
Amd 1900+ 1.46Ghz
Ram :512MB 400Mhz ddr I
inno3D geforce fx5200 128Mb Vram
160Gb Samsung IDE H.D.D.

and i am now ussing it as a storage and server mostly for torrent downloading and now its the first 24h its running but allready had a fault when i left it for about 3 hours running no programs exept torrent there was some ram missing becuz something was eating them first it was only 122Mb free when normal is 312Mb the after about 1h it gave me an error out of memory and i had to restart it now it is all ok for now (about 30min.)
i will see how it performs on longer periods of time.

Questions:
#1.were did the ram go? task manager didn't showd anything consuming them the instalation of win xp is brand new it can't be viruses
#2.is it safe to leave it on per night? can it catch fire or something?

P.s Thanks for answering stupid quaestion but i didn't had a computer that would run for a long periods of time non-stop and expecialy that Old

 

[tsnor]

Usually a memory leak is a software problem, not a hardware problem so low chance of fire. However a smoke detector somewhere high in your room is a good idea in general.

Looking in task manager for processes with a lot of memory was an excellent idea. Did you look before you rebooted on the out-of-memory or after?

If the problem keeps happening, use task manger, sort by memory and see if over time something is getting bigger. That lets you see the problem before the fail (if it happens gradually).

Sometimes when the wrong driver is loaded for hardware you can get memory leaks. Look in device manager for any device with the yellow exclamation. Run windows update, reboot a few times. See if you can pick up any fixes.

Good luck.

 

[Joris]

the memory leak continues and in task manager there are about 10 svhost's but each of them only uses from 20-10 mb of ram to 1mb of ram but now it doesn't even take half an hour to run out of memory... the amount of free ram is very low in about ~10min. task manager only says there is about 23 proceses running so i dont think that it shows me the problem becuz the only ram consuming program it torrent wich takes only ~32mb of Ram the other thing is that the computer has fried usb's wich it has 2 of them but i dont think that's it becuz i never had any problem with that before (when i ussed it 4 years ago).

p.s windows updates are installed registry cleaned with ccleaner still nothing.

Help please,

J.K.

 

[Joris]

one more thing the svhost doesn't have a username normally its system but now its blank

 

[raytseng]

for xp, even 512mb seems a bit low. if system is dipping back and forth into virtual memory especially with an old machine, that can mess things up and fault.
Suggest you disable t

If your time is worth money, and you want to invest more into this machine, you can probably find used memory on ebay for really cheap.

Also if your only program running is torrents, try to figure out if that is the cause of the leak. Without your torrent client running do you see the same memory problem. try a different torrent client.

Plus, how much do you really expect to store with 160gb harddrive...

 

[Joris]

i have solved the problem it nwas a trojan from somewere.. i dont have the problem no more

 

[FinneousPJ]

For a computer for this sort use I recommend using a Linux based operating system.

 

[Joris]

sort use ???? didnt u heard i said 24/7

 

[FinneousPJ]

Yes, and for that I recommend you use a Linux operating system.

 

[Joris]

i have 0 experience on linux soo i prefer win xp