Been off the forum since Thursday 'cause of problems with AOL. Well to be fair I'm not sure whether it was my computer or AOL as every time I called Tech support I was told something different! A few times they said it was a problem with one of their servers - as I could not access any websites once on-line - then I phoned this morning and a very nice man took me through lots of very complicated things to reduce the load memory of my PC!? Which seems to have solved it....I need to do an evening course in computers - I panic when it goes wrong. Any advice from computer experts out there would be most welcome!!

What's your PC's spec? Particularly how much RAM you have ...

It's a Toshiba Satellite S2410-504 Windows XP Pentium IV - I've made no modifications to it. when the guy from AOL was helping me I remember saying at one point "it's got 256k Ram" - although this might be wrong or irrelevent to what you're asking?

That's okay - 256 Megs I hope (not 256k). Unless anyone disagrees, this should be plenty ...

Having a lot of applications running in the background will bring the performance down. Closing all un-necessary ones may help, but as it now appears to work I'd leave well alone. Increasing your RAM to 512 Megs will help a lot, though ...

Hmmm, make sure hard drives are regularly defragged and delete any unnecessary files from your hard disk.

Liam

Ok, Thanks both, I'll see how it runs for the next couple of days. What's defragging and how would I do it?

Ps Logging off now -not beacuse of probs- but it's stopped raining and I want to wash the car!! Keep the replies coming though....

Thanks again...

One sure way of boosting performance is to ensure that the SWAP file on the hard disk is completely defragged and a fixed size, although XP handles memory management much better than previous operating systems so it shouldn't really be necessary.

I'm still using Windows 2000 Pro as it does all I need it to!

Jasper,

To defrag with XP,

right click on my computer,

select manage

then select disk defragmenter from the left hand menu

It should be straight forwad from there, also depending on the last time it was defragged it could take a while but this is CPU and Hard Disk size dependant.

Liam

AOL is a bag of crap - i hate it with a passion

who doesnt hate AOL? lol

i had it ages ago, really messed up my computer when i changed to BT, was a huge mess to get fixed.

let this be a lesson to everyone, never go AOL