I recently switched my operating system to Win2000 and the diagnostics program upon starting up says something to the effect that memory leaks could be a problem...I have had someone mention to me before that this could be the reason my computer seems to slow down after being on for a prolonged period of time...Can someone please explain this situation to me, or suggest something that I might do to "fix" this problem, or how to check to see if this is in fact a problem?Thanks in advance,Regards,Ted Panamarioff - sunny, warm, Kodiak, Alaska

A memory leak refers to loss of available memory over time. The memory "leks" away. Certain programs use memory when running then don't properly free it when they exit. Let me try to explain farther. This example is only to get across the concept, it's not necessarily accurate in the numbers.Example - you have 256 MB Ram much of which is used by the operating system and programs that you run on boot up.Now you run another program, lets say you have 32 MB free memory(memory available to run another program). The program you run uses a cetain amount of RAM, we'll work on all available 32 MB being used. Now you exit that program, it should return ALL 32 MB for use by another program. However, due to bad programming it "forgets" to return say 2 MB. Now you only have 30 MB available. Some programs are very much worse than others at this annoying habit.You can see how, over time, your available memory gets less and less. Now you can only correct this problem by rebooting your system. That is memory leak.bf

hit ctl+alt+del and bring up the task manager. select the second tab and you'll see which programs are running and how much cpu and memory they are using real time.Select the third tab and get a visual graphic of what is going on in the systemI have been running win2000 pro ever since it came out and the number of programs that "horde" memory are unbelievable. I have 640MB installed and rarely see any real impact on performance. But as a case in point, when I fire up the system in normal configuration, about 165mb of memory is used. After several hours and the opening and closing of many big programs and applications, the system finally settles down at almost 200mb. So 40mb is "out there somewhere."If you have a marginal amount of memory, try a program like END IT ALL that allows you to selective shut down(safely) those programs that aren't necessary for operation. You can see sizable gains in "free" memory appear in the Task Manager. Racartronit means something, but I just can't remember what.

Thanks guys!I appreciate the simple, easy to understand description that you've given... I understand this much better...Regards,Ted Panamarioff - Kodiak, Alaska