Comp slows down

[Shvarz]

Hi all!

I am having a strange problem and don't now what to blame.
The problem is that when I play computer games for some time, then after a while (no specific time, but between 10 mins and 1 hr) my computer becomes very slow. And even after I leave the game it stays that way. It becomes rediculously slow. In Word I can type faster than letters appear on screen. After reboot it is back to normal. What the hell could it be?

My system:
K6-2+ 500 (OC to 550)
ELSA Gladiac MX 32Mb (just installed recently, could it be the problem?)
128 Mb RAM
18Gb HD (7200 RPM)(I defragment my drive regularly)
Windows98SE
Norton Utils (I turn them off before playing comp. games)


Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[yoda271828]

The Windows 95/98/Me kernel is very bad at managing its memory. What happens is that after memory is used and the program tells Windows to free it and put it back into the memory pool, Windows tends to just loose it. So it isn't being used and it is in the free memory pool. This is called a memory leak. So after a while you basically run out of memory and Windows starts using the virtualy memory instead, which is very slow compared to the real memory. There are programs that are supposed to free all the memory that Windows looses, but I'm not sure how effective they are. All I can say for sure is to re-boot often.

 

[Shvarz]

Thanks for your reply.

Another question: could this memory leaking be caused by videocard? I don't think it happened before I put the new Geforce2 in my system.
Would re-installing windows from scratch help with my problem?

 

[yoda271828]

Re-installing might help, but it won't fix the memory leak issue because that is a design flaw in Windows 95/98/Me.

Usually the memory leak issue doesn't cause problems as severe as the ones you're describing. You might also be having video card driver problems. Try the Elsa drives as well as the Detonator2 and Detonator3 drivers from Nvidia to see if one helps your problem.