??? PF usage??

[houston_four]

Ok, I'm a noob to this stuff and this board. I know some Software side but not a whole lot. My problem is this: Right now with only IE running my PF usage is at about 368MB which is about 75-80% of the total PF usage available. My CPU usage is approximately 5-15% so not too high. I've ran Spybot S&D, Adaware, and spy sweeper to see if there was anything that I was missing to no avail. This high PF usage (which has occured recently) is making my computer very very slow and laggy. Anything I can do to fix this? And please try to keep it in layman's terms for me. Someone had recomended that I reformat my hard drive and I am seriously considering doing it since all this recent stuff has started. I've gone through my computer and cut out unneccesary programs, files, etc... so your help is greatly apprecated.

Thanks,

Geo

 

[Guden Oden]

There are task managers out there that can display how much memory a process has allocated. I had one for win9x, but it refuses to run in a winnt environment such as xp.

I guess a google-search would help here, but I'm too lazy to do it. Anyway, if you had one of these, you could spot the program that's using exorbitant amounts of memory, and kill/uninstall it without the need for a full format/reinstall of your OS and applications.