I was helping someone with an issue on his Vista computer earlier. The main problem was to do with being unable to log in. We sorted that out, but then there is another major problem.

The system is extremely slow. Most of the RAM is used up (nearly 800MB was in use at boot up, out of (I think) 1GB). The hard drive is constantly working which suggests that it is swapping all the time. Things take minutes rather than seconds and the machine is very sluggish.

I didn't have time to stay and fiddle with it much, but I stopped loads of junk from loading on startup (there was far too much). This made a tiny improvement. But even with few things running, it was still using heaps of memory and was very sluggish.

Just wondering, how normal is this for Vista? I can't imagine it was doing anything else other than swapping memory.