Hello Elizabeth,
I have been receiving your letter for possibly a couple of years now, something that you have to be congratulated on because I have learned more from your letter than speaking to all the so called computer buffs.
I have emailed you on a couple of occasions without being lucky enough to have a reply to my enquires; this I can understand knowing the number of enquires you receive. However, I do have a problem that nobody seems able to resolve and I think that you may be the one.
My computer has started to run very slowly and sometimes freezes and often won’t shut down unless I pull the plug; I have the Norton Antivirus software installed and it assures me that after running all the checks there isn’t any virus involved; I can print out text OK and I can print out anything from the internet, but, when I try to print photographs from “My Pictures” file, it keeps telling me that my virtual memory is too low, or the paging file is too small for this operation to complete, or there is not enough memory to print my pictures. When I bring up the pie chart there is still about two thirds of the memory free; I have also gone through the defrag procedure to no avail. I hope you can HELP.
Regards, Eddie.
Hi Eddie,
You probably have too many things running in the background. It is possible that some of those things are spyware programs that you did not knowingly install.
To see all the items that are loading when your computer starts, click on “Start” then “Run” and type MSCONFIG in the Run dialog box. Click the “OK” button, or just hit the enter key to display the “System Configuration Utility” window.
Click on the “Startup” tab, and you will see a long list of items. Every item with a check mark in front of it is running. To stop items from running the next time you start your computer, just remove the check mark and click “OK” when you are done. You will be prompted to restart your computer.
You can turn off any items you wish, but some you will want to keep running, especially, things like your antivirus.
For the rest of the entries, you can try researching them in this huge online database:
http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php
It might take a little time, but it will be worth it to know exactly what is running on your computer.
Elizabeth