[Darksheare]

How much memory and how big is the page file?

[discostu]

Probably not enough RAM so it’s always playing with the page file. Either that or you got a virus.

[Mr. K]

start the task manager and see what is running and using CPU/Disk

Turn off indexing

make sure you have latest updates- windows 7 without updates had some serious issues with that

[jimt]

Do I have to go back to Windows XP ? Or maybe Windows 2000 ?

[Kirkwood]

Most common answer is that the HDD needs defragmenting and possibly has disk errors. This can be made worse if you have a nearly full HDD. Check your task scheduler from the control panel administration link to see if you have things running during heavy activity, such as file indexing.

[x]

Oh ... your hard disk ...

Never mind.

[LibWhacker]

I don’t think it’s Windows 7. I’d suspect spyware first and foremost. When that crap starts reporting everything you do back to the spyware’s homebase, it can really slow down your machine.

Just for reference, I’m running Windows 7 HOme Premium on a one year old PC with 4GB RAM, 1TB harddrive, 3.4GHz CPU. Nothing special really, and the harddrive never churns away except for a few seconds when I start up some app.

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

Bkmk

[proxy_user]

Firefox is a notorious disc churner. Look at the reads and writes on the Firefox process.

[Red Steel]

Turn off your automatic Windows update. Go only manual.

[relictele]

If it’s cheap it may be underpowered in terms of RAM hence the establishment of and possibly heavy use of the swap file.

Latter-day version of Windows have a search indexer that runs to, er, index files for facilitating searches. Windows 7 has been fairly stable but the ‘Green Bar of Slowness’ when doing file searches remains a major pain. According to MS the index function speeds these searches up.

The promise is that the indexing will only take place when the system is idle but as with all promises from MS I take that with a grain of salt.

[CivilWarBrewing]

Maybe you are in perpetual ‘Indexing’ mode??

[catnipman]

Use the “Resource Monitor” tool under the Performance Tab of the Windows Task Manager to take a look at what processes are using the HD. Do note though, that even when everything else is idle, this tool itself records stuff to the HD continuously when in use.

[waynesa98]

w7 has msconfig. go to win key, run, msconfig. uncheck all startup items that are not MS. See if the churning stops. If yes add back 5 items reboot. Do this until you find the issue. If the churning isn’t stopped then its a virus or the pagefile. BTW there is a lot of stupidity around W10. Its much better then 7 or 8, Edge is a modern browser, and if your system was built for XP, likely it can run W10.

When you update to 10 be aware if you have a newer(3-4 y/o) computer with UEFI (bios) make sure you do a UEFI bios install. your system will boot and be faster.

[Fresh Wind]

Open up the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del), click the Performance tab, then click on Resource Monitor, then click on the disk tab.

That will give you some clues.

I had the same problem on my old XP box, and it was AVG anti-virus that was the problem.

[markomalley]

First:

THE LAST Windows update you will need.

Or, in your case, perhaps you'd do better with:

Note: I run Mint 17.1 on my desktop (where I'm typing now) and Peppermint on an old EeePC netbook. No problems with either...and they both had really good, clean installs.

You can try creating a live usb stick (using the Lili utility) if you wanted to try a "smoke test" before actually committing to an install.

---

As to the subject of your post, as others have said, 1GB is nowhere near enough RAM. Not even close. I would think that 4GB would be the minimum I'd want for Windows 7. A 250GB SSD ought to be more than enough storage, so there is likely something else going on, particularly with a 30GB pagefile (????).

Frankly, RAM is cheap. I would bet that your laptop is using DDR2 memory...most laptops I've seen have two memory slots; you could get 4GB of DDR2 RAM for $60 (two 2GB modules). Note: the link to RAM is provided as an example: the speed may or may not be correct for your specific system.

[minnesota_bound]

You should get Adam to fix your computer.
Scroll halfway down : )
http://www.cowart.info/blog/2008_08_01_rabidfun_archive.html

Try “What ‘s my computer doing?” program. It shows what is going on at the moment. You click on the program running to find more information about it then click on link for Known problems. http://www.itsth.com/en/produkte/Whats-my-computer-doing.php

[boxlunch]

Bkmk

[trebb]

Mine periodically does some extra activity but it’s likely due to some of the auto updates for “critical” items and some indexing.

[dayglored]

A little help for a fellow FReeper ... PING!

You can find all the Windows Ping list threads with FR search: just search on keyword "windowspinglist".