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.

Reduce Thunderbird Memory Usage

If you leave Thunderbird on all day then this 'hack' is for you. The same tweak for Firefox has been widely publicised all over the place. That tweak moves some of Firefox's data to the page file when it is minimized, which reduces the RAM usage. This can be very effective if your system is low on memory. However, it has been noticed that restoring/maximizing Firefox can be slower as it has to fetch the data from the hard disc again. We can also use this tweak in Thunderbird.

Following are the steps:-
1) In Thunderbird, go to Tools > Options and choose the Advanced tab.
2) Click the button next to Advanced Configuration labelled Config Editor.
3) This brings up a similar window to Firefox's about:config page, right click on some white space and choose New Boolean.
4) Enter config.trim_on_minimize as the preference name and select true as the value.
5) Close this window and restart Thunderbird.


Now you can open Task manager and find the thunderbird.exe process, note the memory usage and minimize the Thunderbird window. Does the memory usage drastically reduce? Good you've successfully reduced the memory usage of Thunderbird.

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Release Memory When Firefox Minimized

Sometimes, user install a lot of themes, plug-ins, and extensions which will cause their firefox consume a lot of memory. It is highly recommend that user uninstall unnecessary themes and plug-ins in order to reduce the memory usage.

Normally firefox will take around 80MB of memory after you open a few tabs. But after you “realeased the memory”, it only take around 20-30MB.

Steps:

1. Launch Mozilla Firefox

2. Key in about:config in the address bar.

3. Right click at the content (anywhere) and choose New->Boolean.

4. In the textbox, type config.trim_on_minimize and press OK.

5. Set the value to true, and press OK.

6. Restart firefox to take effect.

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