IE and Windows Live Messenger running real slow on Vista

[Joe The PC Doc]

I kind of replied about this on an earlier thread, but I figured I should repost this.

I had to work on a laptop not long ago running Vista.. It's an Acer, 2 GB ram, Vista Basic, and a few months old.

She complained that if she had to open two programs at the same time, (IE and Windows Messenger) that her computer would bog down, and she would receive out or memory errors...

I took a look at it, and I couldn't get the OoM error to come back, however, it was running MUCH too slow. I started cleaning out some startup programs, removed Acer's eManagement utilities... helped the system in general, things starting moving quickly, expect for IE and Messenger. I uninstalled a few of the recent Windows updates, tried resetting IE's settings and addons... No luck.

Firefox works great, so she's ok with using that as a workaround right now, however, I can't get Windows messenger to work (it seems that in Vista, messenger and IE are hooked in together, it really seems like Messenger doesn't work because IE doesn't work? Can anybody verify that for me?)

Everything else on the system seems to be running at full speed. Any advice?

[Trouble-Shooter]

I don't use Win Messenger for anything, but I know in certain environments it can be useful. With Vista, Superfetch constantly keeps the memory "full" in anticipation of what it believes you will do next on your computer. If there is a memory leak with Messenger or IE (which has had reports of RAM leaks), it could cause the system to hang when Superfetch is enabled.

It might be worth a try to disable Superfetch in the Services control panel, under administrative tools. I could be way off, but it's worth a shot.

Matt

[Trouble-Shooter]

Oh yeah, what are the Virtual Memory settings on that computer?