Q: Every time I run Adware, Spybot or Norton Anti Virus, my CPU usage goes up to 100 percent. It then becomes near impossible for me to log on to web sites. My operating system is Windows XP and I am using a Compaq (nx 9010) laptop with hard disk of 40 GB and 256 MB RAM. Also, I want to upgrade the system to 512 MB RAM.
Would that be all right or would I need to increase it to 1 GB? Please give your suggestions.
A: When you have a CPU crunch, adding more RAM to your system is not going to increase your processing power.
When you have high CPU usage, it means your system needs more processing power or there is some bottleneck which takes up more processing power off your system. You need to identify where these bottlenecks are and find a solution for them. The question of increasing RAM will only help when you run applications that use up a lot of memory.
If you press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, it will bring up the task manager where you can see the CPU usage and Memory used by running applications.
In the task manager, click on the Performance tab. At the bottom under ‘Physical Memory’, you will find Total and Available memory. Normal Physical memory and Page File Memory usage will be 70 % and 40% respectively.
If your application is using up more memory only then you need to think of upgrading your memory capacity.
In your case, the applications you have mentioned are Disk Scanners. They hang up and have trouble when they read large volumes of data or when there is problem reading from the disk. So you would need to see if your system has too much data to scan.
A normal Win XP installation with general application will take up around 5 GB of disk space. Clean up your temporary files and unwanted files from the system using the Disk Cleanup utility, which you can access at Start -> Programs -> Accessory -> System Tools.
Also, ensure that you have installed the Chip Set INF updates for your motherboard, which you should find in the Motherboard CD. If you had changed any settings in the BIOS related to clock speed and the like, try reverting the BIOS setting to Defaults.
Finally, 256 MB RAM is a good figure for a normal PC and 512 MB RAM is more than sufficient but 1 GB is not useful unless you have memory-intensive software for instance, graphic applications like Maya utilized applications.
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