:eek: Of late, programs seem to freeze for no reason. In order to close them and reopen them, I have to "ctrl alt del". When I do that, I see in the list "Windows Not Responding" and have to select that to 'end task' to get things running again (as well as close the 'frozen' program). Recently I have reformatted my pc due to conflicts w/my digi cam software (all resolved, was missing codecs). These probs started before the new software was installed, and still occur now though pc has been reformatted and everything installed new from scratch (no backups were used). Sometimes, I'm so frozen, that I have to reboot completely.
Could this be due to a 'leak' in RAm? My pc is 3.5yrs old. Could it be that I need a new RAM? or a bigger one? Please note, I don't even use half of my 14GIGs since I don't save files on the pc, but burn them to CD instead.
Please help :o (As per my profile: pc is a PIII, 14gig, 1000mhz, 128RAM, Custom Built. Running Win98se & Office Pro 2000 - all updated on the MS site as recent as this week)
I ran "memtest' as suggested on the Window's Support discussions forum, and here are the results for anyone to read that understands them. The test kept restarting and never completed no#7.
PIII=999.3mhz, L1 Cache= 32k 9797mb, L2 Cache=25k 339mb, Chipset=vt82c691, Cached=128m, Rsvd Mem=76k, Mem map=e820-std, Cache=on, Ecc=off, Test=std, Pass=6, Errors=0, Ecc= was blank space, Errs=0.
If anyone understands these results :-| and can tell me what they mean, it would be appreciated. I believe my Ram has a memory leak, but am not certain.
memtest does a fairly long and intensive scan. It will make many repeated passes of its tests; but if none of the passes report errors you're RAM is most probably OK.
By the way- the term "memory leak" refers to a bug in software which causes a program not to free up memory that it is no longer actually using; it is not a hardware issue.
Problems like this could be caused by heat. Listen to your computers fans, and check if they're running. Put your hand behind the power supply fan to check that one.
Is it all programs, or just specific ones?
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