Is your desktop running fine?

After using Windows ME for many years, sick of blue screen and freeze for nothing. So I have decided to format my office desktop and install Windows XP Professional with SP3. The spec of my desktop is Intel Pentium III 1GHz, 512MB RAM and 20GB HDD. This desktop was some old PC left over from previous staff, by the way we still have many desktops with such spec in the office.

After installed XP Pro, then I started to install all my favorites applications, such as Thunderbird, Firefox, AVG8, Palm Desktop, IrfanView, Office 97, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and etc. In addition to that, I also installed Google Chrome (new browser from Google).

The process of backup file, installation and restore files took me about 1 day to complete it. So far I am happy with the installation and the experience of using XP Pro. However after using it for few days, I found that sometime my desktop is like freeze then back to normal again.  In the morning the desktop is running fine but after lunch it is like snail.

Starting from Windows XP, there is this little program Task Manager planted in the system, is a very useful tool that only found in Windows Server platform and now it is available on desktop client. I use task manager to monitor processes running and their memory usage.

Here are the problems and the solutions for it:-
1) Microsoft Find Fast.  This application was installed together with Office 97 and it is auto-started every time when your PC booted up.  This program try to perform document indexing on my hard drive and it causes my desktop freeze and running like snail, immediately I kill the process and remove the Find Fast shortcut from StartUp menu.  If you are not using content search feature, just disable it. Refer to this URL to disable Find Fast indexer http://support.microsoft.com/kb/158705

2) Firefox memory leak problem. By default firefox was not well design to handle the memory efficiently. As you are surfing, it takes out some portion of the memory and did not release it. Firefox 3 has improved it but not good enough.  Refer to my blog http://richietong.multiply.com/journal/item/26

3) Thunderbird memory leak problem. Same problem as Firefox browser, refer to my blog http://richietong.multiply.com/journal/item/27

4) PDF Reader.  I found that Acrobat reader 6.0 uses a lot of memory as compared to Foxit Reader 2.3.  I have compare the memory usage, during the testing both are running without viewing document and in minimize state, Acrobat Reader uses about 5MB RAM & Foxit Reader uses about 2MB RAM. So I decided to remove Acrobat Reader and replace by Foxit Reader, it is light weight PDF reader.

5) Explorer process.  Explorer.exe is one of the main processes running in the system, without it your system will just hang or it will try to restart by itself.  It also have memory leak problem, to solve it you just run Windows Explorer and Maximize & minimize it, the system will release all unused memories.

6) Adobe Flash.  All advertisement flash running on the webpage took some of your memory and CPU. All animation flash needs CPU to execute it, even you minimize the browser. Some of the flash was designed to expand it and block the view of webpage, very irritating.  So I install a flashblock firefox extension and solve this problem. flashblock will display a button and you can click it to run it.  

7) Adblock.  Then I also found the Adblock firefox extension to disable all the irritating animated advertisement. It make my surfing faster, consume less bandwidth.

With all these application running (Thunderbird, Firefox, Windows Explorer, Word and Powerpoint), minimize unused application, I manage to keep my desktop with about 200MB free physical memory.

Last tips: Quit all application that you are not using it, if you need to run it but you don't use it, just minimize it.  This way the system will release those unused memories and push it to virtual memory.