Incredimail and system resources

[mrwilhelm]

I'm currently trying to figure out why a friend's 1GHz PIII based system is doing a spot on impersonation of a 500MHz K6-2 or so. This thing plods along like you wouldn't believe. He's not getting anywhere near the performance he should be.

The system seems to be doing an excessive amount of caching even though there is 384MB of RAM installed (on XP Home). I have done thorough scans for viruses and spyware and the system is clean.

I immediately thought memory leak. A look at the task manager shows that his e-mail client (Incredimail) is always running in background and seems to be using an exorbitant amount of memory, so right now that's my prime suspect.

Anyone here dealt with this app before? Is this thing a known troublemaker or am I barking up the wrong tree?

That seems to be an awfully high price to pay to have goofy cartoon characters notify you of new e-mail...

[shamus]

What happens when you disable it (Incredimail)? That'd be the first thing I'd try....if you haven't already.

[ilovetheusers]

Originally posted by mrwilhelm
I'm currently trying to figure out why a friend's 1GHz PIII based system is doing a spot on impersonation of a 500MHz K6-2 or so. This thing plods along like you wouldn't believe. He's not getting anywhere near the performance he should be.

The system seems to be doing an excessive amount of caching even though there is 384MB of RAM installed (on XP Home). I have done thorough scans for viruses and spyware and the system is clean.

I immediately thought memory leak. A look at the task manager shows that his e-mail client (Incredimail) is always running in background and seems to be using an exorbitant amount of memory, so right now that's my prime suspect.

Anyone here dealt with this app before? Is this thing a known troublemaker or am I barking up the wrong tree?

That seems to be an awfully high price to pay to have goofy cartoon characters notify you of new e-mail...

My mother uses it. I'm waiting for the call, "My e-mail doesn't work..." Others I have spoken to have had issues with it and one mentioned system performance. It looks like a wide open invitation to spread a virus if you ask me. No sir I don't like it.

Anyway - shut down the process and see if system performance picks up or if the disk thrashing stops. You can see if it's set too high and also see if the drive is heavily fragmented as well.

[mrwilhelm]

That's the first order of business the next time I get over there. I was actually there doing an upgrade and ran out of time before I could do any troubleshooting.

I just noticed that his PC wasn't performing up to par while I was working on it and took a quick look before I had to leave. He did confirm the problem, stating that it's definitely not as fast as it used to be.

[shamus]

I know it's old hat, but a good scandisk and a defrag wouldn't hurt either.