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End of the road for XP 64?


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Dear all. Hi I'm new here so please forgive me if I sound like a moron.

I'm running XP 64 on a Dell T3400, Intel Extreme 2 quad core @ 3 GHz, 4 Gb RAM, 2 x 500 Gb SATA HD's, and an NVIDIA Quadro FX570 256Mb running 2 x 17" standard Dell flat screen monitors at 1600x1200 @ 60 Hz. Start up is nice and zippy, but after about an hour and running several applications - nothing heavy, word 2007, firefox, outlook, excel 2007, acrobat 9 is pretty standard - the whole system slows down to a crawl. The first symptom is the Start Menu staying open and then after that it's reminiscent of running computers 18 years ago when you had to wait for everything to catch up with your clicks and typing. Closing all apps fixes the problem, but after an hour then everything starts to grind again.

Everything is up to date - all software and systemware - and all needless features disabled - like shadows and the like. I've got McAfee running for viruses, malware, spyware, etc. and that turns up blank. I've defragged the HD. Tinkered with the page files. All to no avail and I'm out of ideas. Is there anything I might have missed? Is upgrading to Vista the answer to my dreams or does that have similar issues?

The nag is of course that all this has cost a small fortune and I was more productive on a 32 bit version of XP with a P4 @ 3 GHz, 1.5 Gb RAM, and a 200 Gb ATA HD. In fact, I'm even more productive on my Dell Latitude Netbook running an Intel Atom @ 1.6GHz

Edited by drcswalker
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If you are certain that closing down *all* of the running applications "fixes" it (and not just one in particular), you're probably looking at a memory leak that spans all applications. The only things that would have this level of access would be explorer shell extensions, antivirus/antimalware applications, and drivers. If this really is the case, I'd start looking at those three areas as places to start tweaking/troubleshooting.

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Hi cluberti,

Thanks for the reply. I have noticed that it's particularly when I have Office and Acrobat open at the same time - I read a lot of PDF files and write a lot so I can't really have one open then the other, and anyway, that's not the point of having an Uber-PC anyway. I'll have a look at the virus/malware (McAfee) that's installed and see if that does anything, though I'll be doing most of it by guesswork.

Is another possible fix to re-install a 32 bit version of XP? I know I have a 3Gb RAM limit then, but I never come anywhere close to that. Is this possible or does the architecture of the system I described above (Intel Extreme, etc.) prevent me from doing that?

Thanks again for the reply,

drcs

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You shouldn't be having this problem, x86 or x64, so I'd start poking around at the drivers and apps to see what shakes out. If you've moved to 64bit and you have no other real problems, I'd suggest trying to stay on x64 if you can.

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Hi cluberti and anyone else who's reading this,

Bizarrely, after hours on the networks, completely removing Adobe Acrobat Standard and Reader seems to have fixed the problem. I'm instead using Foxit Reader, which will suffice for the moment seeing as I don't need to crop and prepare any PDF's for a while - although I can always use a PDF printer utility for simple conversions. So I'm finally enjoying the speed I paid for :thumbup . Let's hope it lasts and that I don't need to do anything with Acrobat for a while longer. Thanks for taking the time to reply, best regards,

drcs

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Hi g-force,

Sorry if you feel the subject was a bit off the mark, but that's pretty much how I felt - like abandoning XP 64 and either going XP 32, Vista or 7. If you read through though you'll see that I tracked down the issue to Acrobat and Reader - although exactly what I'm not sure, so for the time being I'm sticking with XP64. I'll only change the set up once my software is no longer supported on XP - so I should have a few years left yet.

Anyway, sorry again if you feel misled, hurt or otherwise. Best regards,

drcs (^_^)

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