Almost no response from windows 7..angry wife

If she was angry @ the first post - what is she like after 250+? I have pictures of her in a straight jacket being dragged out of the family home on her heels - foaming at the mouth!

Since you now have a working install with good performance and don't need to save the old corrupted RAID install any longer, I'd suggest you take one of the HD's, plug in to format it as a data drive then save your Win7 backup image to it.

Might as well get some use out of the other HD's by adding them in as needed for storage purposes.

The step to make the Backup Image was for after install was finished - sorry if I didn't make that clear. You want to image after it is set up as you like and running perfectly, but before corruption can start creeping back in. This "baseline image" is all I then use for reinstall.

Use System Restore to get back before itinerant corruption. If necessary, apportion more disk space (10-20%) for System Restore at Computer>Properties>SysProtection.

Be aware that there will be a huge wad of Windows Updates for Office. I would install only a few of these at a time with Restore Points, as they are ones I've had issues with before.

Have you checked Optional Updates for any newer drivers?

I've taken that baseline image and renamed it and put it elsewhere for safe keeping. Just took a lot of tries to get it to run without throwing an error, but as you say that is a differnet issue. Haven't tried again.

So far I have taken windows optional updates for Graphics and network cards.

Unfortunately wife now in bed with flu so not getting much use!!!

So a week later thnigs are still going ok and have installed itunes without an issue. However I have a feeling this isn't going to last. I went to install the next program and saw that her memory usage was up at 70%. One big culprit that I had warned her about was leaving the BBC sport website open which we know about. However there are other programs using unreasonable amounts of memory for example:

Outlook 2010: Hers is doing nothing and sits at 120,000, mine sits at 10,000
Blackberry Desktop Manager: Both are disconnected, hers 140,000 mine 10,000

Does anyone know why these programs would be so memory hungry on her machine, but not on mine. I'm guessing the answer is she never shuts anything down so is this just the effect of a weeks drift?

Thanks for any advice as suspect a lot of her problems are related to the way she uses the pc.

Mike

Is everything unchecked in msconfig>startup except AV and gadgets/stikynotes?

I wouldn't worry about high memory usage unless it causes system to hang at all.

Well, there is also another thing to consider with regards to Outlook and Blackberry. Compare her usage of Outlook, database size, how much mail, how it is organized and how much stuff in general. Blackberry will also be looking at that and trying to sync that with their Internet Service, as that's part of its job. Depending on how active your wife is with regards to her Outlook, hers can be more than yours. Also, don't forget, there is that inherent Windows Search indexing that will eventually come into play as an active outlook will be part of what it indexes as well.

Only MS Security, sidebar and Office BCCync.exe in the msconfig

Oddly we have identical Outlooks as we sync them together across pcs so if anything hers is smaller than mine in that I have al lthe archive folders etc. We therefore have identical Blackberry syncs...even the same phone...how twee we are! I was just wondering if this was an idndication that her pc configuration was fundamentally less efficient at manging memory.

I don't know if I can or need to train her out of this, but I found the pc at 84% memory usage this morning agian mostly iexplorer. I closed it all down and restarted and I get 2 processes using 60,000. I then opened a new tab with her igoogle homepage goes to 130k and within an hour is at 200k. She has lots of silly moon cycle gadgets etc on Google. Is this normal as surely lots of people have web pages that update running constantly? It was at 850k first thing partly due to BBC sports being open.

As Greg says maybe it doesn't matter if pc is behaving OK just made me hestitiate before loading the next program.

Thanks again

Mike

I think the user of the pc doesn't understand that opening a program and then minimize it just makes it smaller in appearance on the task bar. It is still running in the background using resources. If one minimizes enough things and will not change there ways you will just need more computer.

I think she means to close them then one of the kids demands something and it gets forgotten!

I'd still love to know why something dull like Blackberry desktop manager that is inactive loads with 6 times the memory usage than on my pc. I don't really understand memory and all the different types. Itunes loads with 140k on her pc when inactive, mine with 4k!!!! Her library is much bigger so maybe that is the explanation.

Maspin... Explain how your wife uses Outlook...

From the sounds of it, she has a 'smaller' mailbox, but you also state that you sync both your mailboxes together. That doesn't make sense to me.

And just cause you use the same VERSION of Outlook, does not mean your version of Outlook is setup the same as hers. There are several things that still come into play, such as if she wishes to use specific sounds. Outlook does have one or two non-control panel sounds. Her calendar may have more information or is more active than yours or her contacts get updated more than yours or even has pictures associated with her contacts.

The next thing you have to understand is that if her computer is handling memory differently, it would not 'grow' from programs. System Configurations with regards with memory would hit on Performance, not on memory bloat. Things like how fast memory is accessed or how fast things are handled, but never on how much memory there is unless we are talking about the difference between x32 implementation and x64 implementation and how the program is coded, and even then, the system configuration would not qualify much more than just the amount of memory you put into the system. The OS determines the amount of memory used based on the type of program it is working with.

Lastly, Blackberry Desktop is hardly inactive. It checks with outlook if something is going on. Again, depending on HOW active Outlook is being used will also affect the memory size. If she is reading and deleting mail, that is activity. Even if her mail is smaller than yours, it still has to sync that information to the blackberry via the Blackberry Desktop program.