[jimt]

This PC has 1 GB of memory - it’s a cheapo.

I have the latest version of Kaspersky - whatever the heck it is for 2015.

I’ve been messing with pagefiles, etc., for many years. NOTHING has changed since purchase. I regularly run “cleanup” and defrag, like in the old days.

Kaspersky has given me warnings which I’ve always heeded, Shall I wipe this HD and install an antique (and clean) os ?

[Kirkwood]

One Gb RAM will barely run Win7. Two Gb is the minimum I would recommend. I would let Windows sort out the pagefile memory itself and do not try to force it to use more if the HDD is already slow, or turn it off completely, which would be a serious mistake with only 1 Gb of RAM.

Tune up your HDD first by defragging and check for disk errors, then if you have less than 15% free space you should free up space by dumping some of your data to another storage drive or upgrade the HDD to a larger and faster drive. You should also upgrade the RAM to at least 2Gb if you are getting it serviced, but 4 is even better.

Or maybe it is just time to get another computer with better specs all around. There are some good deals for used computers (see walmart or dell) if you don’t want to buy something new.

[smokingfrog]

1 GB of memory is not enough.

[Stentor]

Elementary OS

I probably have the same netbook you have. Never could play youtube properly with that Windows 7 Starter edition. Ran Lubuntu on it for a while, which worked OK. Elementary OS runs great. All depends on if you need a program that runs only on Windows.

[Fhios]

This PC has 1 GB of memory - it’s a cheapo There are some options that need to be turned off if you're using an SSD disk drive ... like 'trim'. However, if you have the latest and greatest version of Windows 7 service pack 1, it's detected and done automagicly. 1 GB for running windows 7, not good enough. Anti-Virus software sucks up memory. Turn off real time protection if you have it enabled. You simply cannot run it effectively with 1G memory. Paging and swap space are reserved on the disk to swap out chunks of memory to disk when new memory is needed but the old memory is still reserved. Even on a SSD drive this will become a problem with so little memory as you will be constantly churning memory in and memory out. If you just want to browse, dabble online ... go Linux. It's much more efficient on low memory models. With 1G memory you're probably not running any commercial software.

[jimt]

Ran disk cleanup and defrag with little result. Turning off indexing (I think) seems to have had a huge and welcome result

Thanks ! If it’s not permanent I’ll be back for more help !

[Boogieman]

I think the RAM is your culprit. 1 GB is very low for Windows 7, you really should have around 4 GB. So to make up the difference, I suspect Windows is just using your hard drive constantly for virtual memory.