I've gone in through MSCONFIG and turned off just about everything at boot up but my Symantec Virus program - have nothing running in Task Scheduler; and yet if I check at bootup, I will already be using 67% of my memory.

Reformated and reinstalled the OS and My MS OFFICE programs just a month ago and have only reinstalled programs I need for work. I do use MS Messenger; but don't load it at startup since this problem came up just this past week.

Used to be able to have a spreadsheet open, Outlook email, a wordprocessing document and my QuickBooks timer running all day long. Now if I try to do this one or the other will crash.

What might have caused this sudden change? Win98 still sees all the RAM; My swap file is running in 2GB of open space.

This is driving me crazy!

: : I have 128MB of RAM in my system. Pentium ll, 350 mHz chip, Windows 98. I have Norton Utilities installed and one of the sensors I have on my desktop to monitor is Memory Load. The info for this sensor says that if it is at 50% it means all RAM has been allocated. When I boot my computer, before I even open anything the sensor is ALREADY at 50%. Then once I open email and Internet, the sensor creeps up over 80%. I don't get it. I have a lot of icons on my desktop - do they eat up that much RAM? In my taskbar upon startup I have Norton Antivirus, Task Scheduler, Clean Sweep, Crash Guard, and icons for Real Player and Real Jukebox. Do THEY eat up that much RAM?
: : Help! Thanks!

Norton is OK for checking stuff, but I turn it off. It slows the computer down and really annoys you when you are trying to work.

I found the best thing to do is use norton for checking for bad sectors, and maybe looking at the system sometimes just for kicks, other than that, it's off.

I found that "mcafee" makes a good little thing called bomb shelter (part of nuts & bolts or their virus checker), and I run it and my virus checker and that's about it for start up programs.

If programs are running OK and you are getting work done, leave it alone. Take the stuff you don't need out and turn all the extra stuff off.

: I have 128MB of RAM in my system. Pentium ll, 350 mHz chip, Windows 98. I have Norton Utilities installed and one of the sensors I have on my desktop to monitor is Memory Load. The info for this sensor says that if it is at 50% it means all RAM has been allocated. When I boot my computer, before I even open anything the sensor is ALREADY at 50%. Then once I open email and Internet, the sensor creeps up over 80%. I don't get it. I have a lot of icons on my desktop - do they eat up that much RAM? In my taskbar upon startup I have Norton Antivirus, Task Scheduler, Clean Sweep, Crash Guard, and icons for Real Player and Real Jukebox. Do THEY eat up that much RAM?
: Help! Thanks!