"I've got good news and bad news," the computer said to me.

[alexandraerin]

You all remember when I said I was having problems with my email client not properly showing me all the emails it downloaded? I still don't know what exactly was causing it, but cleaning up all the accumulated crapware on my compy has rescued hundreds of email from limbo.

And that's not counting the spam that's in my main spam-catching address.

(Fortunately a lot of them are just Livejournal and Facebook notifications, though.)

So, in addition to all the email I haven't seen because my email-checkin'-computer was out of order, I also have older emails going all the way back to before my trip to New Orleans that I'm just now seeing.

Fun!

I suppose I'm going to set up some rules/filter-thingies to try to sort them into more manageable masses (in particular, to get the notices from PayPal about sponsors and such separated out where I can see them).

Comments

Re: Computer Problems Suck

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

If you've got 8 GB in it and you're running into problems, there's a few potential causes. One is not having enough room on the hard drive for temporary files- but given you've got nearly a full terabyte on your C drive, I'm going to guess there's plenty of free space.

The next possibility is that you've got a lot of programs running simultaneously- either things on the taskbar or in the background. If you're running Aero, you might want to try disabling it for a while and using the less fancy appearance settings, see if that helps at all. If it is, that's your issue.

The last possibility is something gumming up the works, software-wise. Either an install that didn't go quite right, or malware, or something else causing things not to work quite the way they should. This could also be caused by multiple programs that are overlapping, including security programs. For instance, let's say you have three different programs that scan any other program that starts running, to make sure it isn't infected. They're all trying to get at the same files, and also possibly going to be checking out each other. The old too many cooks thing.

It's difficult to say offhand, but I think lack of RAM is probably not the problem here. It might be necessary to try something else- preferably something that's free.

Re: Computer Problems Suck

[sage-blackthorn.livejournal.com]

Um....What's Aero and how do I know if it's on the computer?

Re: Computer Problems Suck

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Aero is part of Vista- it's basically Microsoft saying, "You know, all these people have these really fancy computers and really powerful video cards. Why don't we have the operating system use more of that power." Thus, they created Aero- basically a Windows desktop where the frame around an application looks like it's made of glass, so you can see what's behind it.

This is Aero. Or at least what it looks like. There's more to it, but that's the most easily identified aspect.

Re: Computer Problems Suck

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting that this use of extra processing power is also one of the biggest complaints about Vista- people bought those powerful video cards and CPUs and RAM for games and applications, not because they wanted their OS to be more of a resource hog. Newer OSes using more resources is not unusual, but attempting to sell it as a feature was... less than genius.

Re: Computer Problems Suck

[sage-blackthorn.livejournal.com]

Oh THAT thing. Doesn't seem to be running, I've just got regular frames.

Re: Computer Problems Suck

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Well, that eliminates an easy test.

Re: Computer Problems Suck

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Another option is to hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete which should bring up another screen with one of the options mentioning the Task Manager. Starting that up should allow you to see how much memory and CPU time is being used by everything that's running. That should help you see how much is going on and how much you've got happening at once.