Question: Recently, my PC has been taking a few hours to completely boot up from sleep mode. Even then, it runs very slow. The most recent logon finally prompted me to look further. I eventually got Task Manager to open and after monitoring the performance tab discovered the CPU runs from 6%-33% but the Memory is at 99% and the Disk 0 (C:) is 100%. Which leads me to believe my RAM is maxxed out along with the “reserve” on my HDD. I only have an 8GB module and my PC appears to be upgradeable to 16GB. I believe I’m on the right track but is there something else I should be looking for that would help?
– Tony M.
Niceville, Florida
Answer: You’re definitely on the right track, Tony, although you may be misunderstanding a couple things, and be mildly short on terminology and the way the system operates. Hopefully that’s what I’m here for.
Let me say first that the “100%” that Task Manager is reporting on your hard drive does not mean that the drive is full. This number represents the percentage of the available read/write bandwidth to the hard drive that is currently being used. So, that 100% means that every possible byte of bandwidth to the hard drive is being consumed, and it’s still not enough. It’s unlikely (but not impossible) that a single process is using all of it. To some extent, you can see what processes are using it by clicking in the header of the list in Task Manager, in the box that says “Disk.” This will cause the list of processes to be sorted by the amount of disk bandwidth each one is consuming. The number is in megabytes per second. A typical system sitting at idle will show zero percent of the disk bandwidth being used.
In normal operation, Windows maintains a pool of what’s called virtual memory. This is nothing more than a protected area of the hard drive that is managed by Windows. The purpose is to allow the many applications that run on your system to use more memory than the physical amount of RAM you have installed. As programs access memory, the part that they need is swapped from the hard drive into active RAM. That process is reversed when an application is idle, or a higher priority process needs additional memory. This happens constantly, the whole time your system is running. As an aside, this often is why you will see your hard drive access light blinking when no files are being read or written to the disk.
This all works pretty well until two or more processes are simultaneously demanding RAM, and the required amount is consistently higher than your system’s installed physical RAM. The system becomes bogged down in a condition known as Thrashing and it spends more time swapping stuff on and off the hard drive than doing any actual computing. In the great, grand scheme of things that happen within a computer, the slowest operation a system can do is input/output, or I/O. Hard disk I/O is painfully slow compared to the speed of access to RAM. This makes the whole process run slow, which in-turn slows down your whole computer.
I very much agree with you that your computer could benefit from additional RAM. With 16 gigs of physical RAM on board, your system would do a whole lot less swapping to and from the hard drive and you would almost surely eliminate thrashing. The system will appear to run much faster. I say it that way, because by benchmark standards it won’t perform computing operations any faster than it ever has, but based on your human perception of how peppy the machine responds to mouse movements, application launches, even menu pull-downs will make it look jet powered compared to what you have now.
Another thing that can speed up the apparent speed of an older PC is replacing the spinning magnetic hard disk with a solid-state drive or SSD. These come in several form factors these days, and on an older PC your bandwidth is still limited to that of the hard disk interface, which in your case is probably SATA, or serial advanced technology attachment. Don’t get hung up on the word “advanced.” It was advanced when the SATA standard was first released some 20 years ago. Nowadays, not so much. But an SSD will allow you to take advantage of the full speed of the SATA connection, which your current spinning magnetic disk is probably not doing. Regardless, any speed increase you can squeeze out of your hard drive will translate to faster swapping to and from the drive, which again, will make your system appear faster to you.
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