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To: andy kelly who wrote (1476)	5/23/1998 3:49:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32871

>> everything slows down noticeable and my disk drive starts a near constant chattering.<< How much room is left on your harddrive? It is probably something to do with your swap file resizing itself or your cache or an interaction between the two. Resize one or the other or both or get a new harddrive or make more room on your drive by deleting some old data/programs. Zeuspaul

To: andy kelly who wrote (1476)	5/23/1998 4:58:00 PM
From: SI Brad	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 32871

Andy, Some versions of Netscape are notorious for "leaking" memory while you surf. Once it runs out of real memory, it starts using your hard drive (virtual memory). If you periodically close your browser, wait for your hard drive to thrash around a bit, and then reopen the browser, you won't need to restart windows. Upgrading to the latest version of the browser or switching to Explorer might help too. I'm just guessing you're using Netscape.... Brad

To: andy kelly who wrote (1476)	5/23/1998 6:21:00 PM
From: Dick Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32871

Andy Kelly's system... He says, " I can read messages fine for about an hour or so and then everything slows down noticeable and my disk drive starts a near constant chattering. I have found (out of frustration) that if I shut down windows and then restart, every thing is ok again for another hour." Zeuspaul gave a good suggestion about the harddrive filling up with browser cache.... Another possibility, especially since this is old Win 3.1, is that Andy is running out of memory... especially if his browser is leaking memory a little. And, even though memory is cheap, adding more usually doesn't help Win 3.1 so much, because some critical data must fit in low memory, and that's often what runs out. It might not hurt to upgrade to Win 95, or to a newer version of whatever browser you are running. By the way, Andy, just so we can make more guesses, what browser to you use? But I don't think I'd recommend holding out for Win 98... unless you have some specific reason to want its features. It's likely to come out a little buggy, especially since they seem to be rushing to beat the DOJ! Dick

To: andy kelly who wrote (1476)	5/24/1998 11:10:00 AM
From: Spots	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32871

Andy In Win 3.1 there are three components of memory important to windows known as graphical, user, and main (or if not main something similar -- it's been years since I used 3.11 regularly). You can see a metered display by running sysmeter.exe, which should be in your windows directory. It will put up a little bar graph of your current allocations. Of these three, graphical and user are fixed size (128k if I remember correctly), and main represents the virtual memory available on your machine. Virtual memory is real memory plus the swap file. Most Win 3.11 problems are caused by a shortage of graphical memory, because that is a scarce, fixed resource. However, in you case it sounds like a main memory problem. As Brad said earlier (I think it was Brad), earlier versions of both Netscape and IE had notorious memory leaks, which is a way of saying they allocate memory then forget about it, so rather than reusing it they allocate more. Sooner or later, they allocate all the real memory available, so windows begins SWAPPING the real memory into the virtual memory swap file. At this point, many memory accesses are turned into a disk access, your hard disk goes crazy, and everything returns to a crawl. This is called THRASHING. Sound familiar? Unfortunately, Win 3.11 is very stupid about memory allocation. If a program allocates memory and fails to deallocate it, Win 3.11 usually CANNOT deallocate the memory when the program terminates. When that happens, your only choice is to restart windows (you don't actually have to reboot, but you do have to exit windows to DOS then restart windows). You can tell if this is going on by watching the sysmeter display. If the third bar on the graph gets shorter and shorter, you are gradually using up main memory. If this is your problem you can postpone it but not fix it by adding more real memory (adding more virtual memory by increasing the swap file won't help because thrashing begins when you actively allocate more memory than you have real memory available). The best advice posted here is first, and quickest, upgrade to the latest browser version. Second, upgrade to Win 95. Win 95 CAN deallocate memory when a program leaves it allocated on termination. Usually. Anyhow, it's a heck of a lot better than Win 3.11 (which couldn't do it at all). When you upgrade to Win 95 (or Win 98) you probably want to add more real memory anyhow, but that's another issue. Good luck, Spots