Why is my computer really slow despite having a considerable amount of free memory?

Solution 1:

The disk activity is on the pagefile. You need more RAM.

Note that the Winzip memory optimiser is using more the 25% of the RAM. I'd get rid of that and any similar utilities before you investigate further.

Solution 2:

2GB is not plenty of RAM. I consider that the minimum for medium usage PCs.

Also, your hard drive is a 5400 RPM drive, which is going to be a huge bottleneck. When the 2GB of RAM does need to fetch, and it will often then it is going to have to go to your slow hard drive. This is confirmed by the high IO we see on your hard drive.

I would at minimum upgrade the drive. Either get a hybrid drive like the Seagate Momentus XT or an SSD. This alone should fix it, but a bump in RAM would also make a huge difference.

As for:

I ran Winzip Utilites to optimize the computer (malware/junk search, disk defragmentation, driver updates, registry clean-up) but It made things even worse.

Not surprising. These optimization programs are known for causing issues more than fixing them, especially when they are allowed to touch the registry. All they can do is guess and it can be bad. I would upgrade the hard drive and use a clean new image.

Solution 3:

I don't know if I'd call 2GB a lot of ram. But that's not the point.

• Run some tests on your HDD. It could be on its way out. If that checks out, move to the next idea...
• I would highly recommend reinstalling the OS. It still never ceases to amaze me how often this works. For all you know, there's an issue in the registry, or some dll file or god only knows what. If you reinstall and you're having the same problem, you can be certain beyond almost all doubt, its a hardware problem, and then you troubleshoot accordingly.

Solution 4:

The most obvious solutions have already been given by others (add memory (2GB is really not enough for Win7), remove the 'memory optimizer)'.

Some other things that may help, permanently:

• If you're also unsatisfied with slow startup, use Startup Delayer. And check program settings 'Start when Windows starts' - do you really need that?

• Check what all the processes running in memory are for. You can probably ditch several programs that you don't need.

• Disable the search indexing that Windows does. I have seen machines with slower HDs and low memory grind their disks because of that.

• Scan your disk with software that investigates all sectors and enables the SMART system to reallocate bad sectors (HDD Regenerator or SpinRite)

Some other things that may help a little, temporarily (for specific programs or speed in general):

• Take some time to clean your disk: all browser cookies older than 2-3 years (I had accumulated 12000 cookie files in 5 years), all temporary files, and files you just don't need any more (burn them to DVD or store them in the cloud).

• If you have more than one partition, move the swap file to another partition, then back. This recreates the file. If you have only one partition run SysUtils PageDefrag.

Others will probably come up with more tips.