Another Topic Disappeared

[Briggsy]

Yesterday I posted a new topic asking why my computer was whirring away, working hard when I read a topic on Thaivisa.

Now the topic has disappeared. Can anyone shed any light?

[sbk]

Probably because a poster replied advising how to break the rules. Still, if your computer really is making alot of noise you should try checking your fan.

[Briggsy]

I don't know the correct IT terminology.

It is not the fan. It's the whirring and grinding of the RAM(???). You always get it when your computer is working at full capacity. It always happens when I'm logged on to ThaiVisa. And very unusually it happens when I haven't asked the computer to do anything, when I'm just reading. I'm sure somebody else has the same experience and knows what it is.

[Thaddeus]

Could be a noisy hard drive, is the drive activity light flashing when it makes this noise?

[sbk]

RAM doesn't actually move, cannot be the RAM. sounds like the hard drive, to be honest. How much RAM do you have in your computer?

and does it make the sound when you visit the lo-fi version?

[meadish_sweetball]

Sbk is right - RAM has no moving parts, RAM modules are fanless, thin wafer-like circuit board sticks inserted into slots on your main board.

It is more likely your hard drive that spins. If you do not have enough RAM installed in your computer to smoothly run all your open programs, Windows will solve it by using part of your hard disk instead. Since hard disk access times are slower than RAM access times, this slows down your computer and puts more strain on your hard disk.

RAM is not very expensive these days. You may want to bring your computer to a shop and see if you can buy some more RAM, or trade in what you have for an upgrade, paying for the difference in price.

[jfchandler]

For the non technical folks out there, including the OP, there's a nice, simple small FREE software package called Belarc (Google "Belarc Advisor") that you download and easily install on your PC... Then, in about 2 mins, the Belarc software will prepare and produce on your screen a complete report on your computer's hardware and software, including such details as how much memory your PC has and in what configuration it's installed.

Then, you can go online to any number of broad retail computer memory providers, enter the make and model of your PC (for non-Thai models), and the sites will tell you how much maximum memory your computer can hold, in what sizes of chips, and how they can be installed. Some sites like that are Kingston, Crucial and Simpletech from the U.S.

As another poster said, memory is cheap these days, and usually pretty easy to install. In general, Windows XP systems want to have at least 512 MB (megabytes) of memory, while Windows Vista is recommended for 1 GB (gigabyte). If your PC less, that could be contributing to the problem.

Another potential cause of the OP's reported problem is a hard disk drive that is either wearing out or filled to capacity or excessively fragmented. You should use the Disk Cleanup (gets rid of accumulated junk files such as from web browsing) and Disk Defragment (compacts file fragments stored on your disk) utilities provided in Windows to help maintain your hard drive and also see if disk problems (instead of memory) might be the source of your problem.

Lastly, if everything else on your computer has stayed the same, and the hard drive whirring problem was not occurring before, another potential cause could be a virus or similar malware infection. Make sure your PC is running a good anti-virus/anti-malware program that's regularly updated with virus definition updates. If you don't have that, there are several that are available for free trial downloads. You can install and then have them run a full scan of your system to check for problems.

[Guest Reimar]

For the non technical folks out there, including the OP, there's a nice, simple small FREE software package called Belarc (Google "Belarc Advisor") that you download and easily install on your PC... Then, in about 2 mins, the Belarc software will prepare and produce on your screen a complete report on your computer's hardware and software, including such details as how much memory your PC has and in what configuration it's installed.

Then, you can go online to any number of broad retail computer memory providers, enter the make and model of your PC (for non-Thai models), and the sites will tell you how much maximum memory your computer can hold, in what sizes of chips, and how they can be installed. Some sites like that are Kingston, Crucial and Simpletech from the U.S.

As another poster said, memory is cheap these days, and usually pretty easy to install. In general, Windows XP systems want to have at least 512 MB (megabytes) of memory, while Windows Vista is recommended for 1 GB (gigabyte). If your PC less, that could be contributing to the problem.

Another potential cause of the OP's reported problem is a hard disk drive that is either wearing out or filled to capacity or excessively fragmented. You should use the Disk Cleanup (gets rid of accumulated junk files such as from web browsing) and Disk Defragment (compacts file fragments stored on your disk) utilities provided in Windows to help maintain your hard drive and also see if disk problems (instead of memory) might be the source of your problem.

Lastly, if everything else on your computer has stayed the same, and the hard drive whirring problem was not occurring before, another potential cause could be a virus or similar malware infection. Make sure your PC is running a good anti-virus/anti-malware program that's regularly updated with virus definition updates. If you don't have that, there are several that are available for free trial downloads. You can install and then have them run a full scan of your system to check for problems.

Ok, XP works fine with 512 MB and Vista with 1 GB!

But if you run MS-Office or Photoshop or an other memory "hungry" application, your computer will access the harddisk as "virtual" memory which means, the HDD will works nearly the whole time.

To work around to first and best choice is to install additional memory as other Members was explaining. XP will works great with 1 GB and Vista with 2 GB or more. You can also try to use an Memory Manager but this isn't the best solution just only helps to keep as much memory free as possible.

If the system need to use a lot virtual memory, on harddisk, that even means that the overall performance of the computer will slow down because of the low speed of re-write to the HDD! The write speed to memory is just a few ns (Nano Seconds) but to HDD is ms (Mili Seconds) which is a very huge difference.

Cheers.