Internet Explorer and Firefox comparison

[mad1]

I was looking in Taks manager for WIN 2K at the usage of Firefox.exe and IExplorer.exe. I thought Firefox was a smaller program and used less resources? ALso can someone explain 'PID" to me?

Program PID CPU Memory(K)
Firefox.exe 892 1-4 23,024
Iexplore.exe 1476 00 20,560

How do I find what programs are running at startup?

[Epyon9283]

PID is the process ID number.

Firefox uses more resources than IE. 3 extra mb wouldn't bother me though

[vass0922]

PID = Process ID
The ID the system refers to for a given process.
not of much use 90% of the time for users.

IExplore.exe doesn't take as much resources because it ties into resources already taken by the OS thereby bloating up the OS resources more. (and hiding resources required by IE)

[mad1]

My computer has been slowing down so I have been running Adware,spybot and looking into unknown running processes.
On firefox I sometimes have to click my mouse two or three times to select somthing, this is not a issue on IE explorer. Ihad thought my wireless mouse could have been the problem.

[ShawnD1]

Sounds like you don't have enough RAM. A computer in my network is like that because it's running Windows XP on only 128mb RAM.
Another problem could be that your hard drive is slow and the swap file is split into more than 1 section. The crappy computer mentioned above has the swap file over 3 separate areas of the hard drive. Virtual memory is very slow because of that.

How much RAM do you have? Is your swap file managed by you or by Windows? Is your hard drive almost full?

[mad1]

"he crappy computer mentioned above has the swap file over 3 separate areas of the hard drive. " Which one would that be?

Pentium 4 2.0GHZ
523KB Ram,RDRAM
Windows 2000 SP4

2 Drives
C Drive, 43% free, partition
D Drive, 80% free, partition
G Drive, 72 % free

This is a new occurring issue, firefox has not had this problem in the past?

[ShawnD1]

You have lots of RAM so RAM isn't a problem.

What I think you should do is turn off the swap file, restart the computer, make a new swap file to a specific size.
Go to control panel >> system >> advanced (tab) >> performance settings >> advanced (tab) >> virtual memory change
Select "no paging file" then hit set. Restart the computer. Go back to those settings and set it to an exact amount, mine is 1024 minimum and 1024 maximum.

After that is done, defrag the hard drive.

If everything went good, your hard drive before should look like this (blue is non-fragmented, red is fragmented, yellow is swap file):



The after should look like this:




The before picture is the screwed computer I mentioned (defrag doesn't even do anything on it). The after picture is my gaming computer. Notice how my good computer has 1 swap file area, but the crap computer has 3.

[mad1]

Here is my drive,

[Gilthanaz]

ShawnD1, is that diskkeeper you used to defrag?

[ShawnD1]

Yes it is.