Good Morning --
Again Sorry to be so Slow to Get the Fix attempt Tried -- It was a Busy Week and Previous Weekend for Online sales and i just could not take it apart and chance anything. I just kept reloading and getting by -

Well,,,,,,,,, to catch up - My system function Continued to Degrade -- Having to stop and Restart each hour of work - Occasionally having bad startups - Odder and Odder Crashes Occuring -- -- Same problems with Programs that just dont open , yet show up in my Running Processes - Run32DLL Files remaining open. Computer wont shut down at times -- Parts of Video remaining on screen when switching to another program..

So -- this Morning -- I Pulled the 256 Card and Inserted the two 128 MB Cards -- Its like a New Computer Again -- Fast ( For what it is ) -- Screens seem to "Pop" on -- None of the Above Problems -- I have been working it ALL DAY and Night -- Listing Stuff ALL DAY and NIGHT -- With AOL -- 3 IE Windows - 2 Excel Spreadsheets -- A Word Document and at times More IE's or Spreadsheets -- NO PROBLEMS --

If History Repeats -- it will work great for a Week and then the above maladies will start Creeping in -- worse each day -- until I unplug everything - Switch back to the other Memory Card and Get another Good Week out of it.

The 512 Configuration and the 320 Configurations both Netted several Good Weeks and a little slower degredation than I have experienced with the last 256 MB Card.

I am so Puzzled --
Ran Disc Clean up - Spybot - NAV - Scan Disc and Defrag - this afternoon while preping Product, just to give it any advantage I Could.


I will keep you posted as to its operation - I'll be using it lots next week , so I will be watching for the tell tale video Overlays and Lack of Memory Signs that seem to be the first signs that the Scenario is starting - by Next Weekend --


Any Ideas Appreciated --

Mike

Great to hear that it's running so much better again. What a weird problem though.

The fact that simply changing the RAM seems to cure all the problems (at least for a short space of time) tells us that there's nothing on the hard disk (e.g. dodgy Windows installation, too many temp files, etc) that are causing the problem. It just seems to be the RAM. But all configurations seem to demonstrate the same problem. Interesting that the bigger configurations seem to last longer though.

The above evidence seems to suggest some kind of memory leak through the motherboard. I've heard of memory leaks in software before (Microsoft had to release a patch for Windows 95 pretty soon after it came out because otherwise all the memory would be drained away within a few hours) but I've never heard of hardware doing this. Also, when you switch off the system at night, the memory should be completely flushed so that the next morning it's 100% refreshed. I can't think of any other explanation though. Weird.

It would be a good idea to download an evaluation copy of SiSoft SANDRA. This is a popular testing / benchmarking suite that goes through the different components inside your PC and runs extensive checks to see if they've got any problems. You can get it from www.sisoft.com.

Mike i had the same problem, by the way my system runs 320meg of memory, eversince I updated to AOL8, noticed a big difference on system performance, tried th 9.0 and it got worse, no doubt it is AOL software, it really sucks, to much s----- running in the back ground, sucking all that memory,,I went back to AOL 5.0 and the issues stop, I have come to the conclusion that AOL can't develop software that that are functional and reliable at the same time. another thing to keep in mind is, AOL is the only company that I know of, that upgrade and leave the oldest version in your machine, I'm guessing they just don't know how to do clean upgrades. Hope this helps Mike.

Sincerely,

Zeuz

yes, my aol 9 wasnt working so i re-installed it and it didnt delete the old one, just called the new one aol9a, i dont use the aol brouser i use aol dialer to connect to broadband