Paging file preformance questions

Hello,

I have been having a performance problem. My computer (toshiba laptop) suddenly became incredibly slow. I has been screaming fast since I bought it last october, but the other day it suddenly slowed to a crawl.

I have run the antivirus and spyware tools as well as HijackThis with no problems and I had the results reviewed in the visrus / spyware thread and it appeared to be clean of anything to cause such a slowdown.

Since nothing was found I started looking closer at the processes. I found my paging file is running a flatline at 241 MB steadily with no other applications running. Is this normal? I have 512 MB SDRAM. I turned off the paging completely, rebooted and windows turned it back on automatically. Does booting up require more than 512 MB RAM? Also, could this be the reason for such slow performance and would bad ram be suspect?

Thanks all for your help. I really don't want to reformat just yet.

 

RAM. I hope 512Mb might "kick it over" . Any (CURRENT) version of Windows should start/run with that much (I hope! ). The future? ...hmmmmm.
If you have more than 1 stick of RAM, try one at time, in different slots.
You could run the diagnostics in my signature.

Drivers. See if Toshiba have updated drivers for your model.

Matt