XP client 5.6 brings system down to a crawl

[nikster]

hello,

 

retrospec works fine on my system, except for one thing: after running the client, the system is dead slow.

 

i have further isolated the problem (since we back up every day, this happens to me every day): the problem is some combination of windows XP system cache and client.

 

it looks as if the client's accessing files adds them all to the system cache. the system cache grows until there is no physical memory left, and all applications that are running are paged out to the hard disk. e.g. the system cache will be 600M (i have 756M of physical RAM installed), and everything will be paged to the disk.

 

if, say, Application A used 150M before the client was running, it will be using 4M after - the rest being on the disk. if i then want to use Application A again (or just shut it down - same thing), all of the 150M have to be loaded back into physical RAM, which takes a very, very long time on my system (a laptop with a slow hard drive).

 

i have tried to prevent XP from doing this, but unsuccessfully. i think the error is that all files that Retrospec accesses are needlessly added to the cache. they never should be (since Retrospec accesses them only once, it doesn't help anything anyway).

 

there seems to be no way in XP to limit the size of the system cache. i have already set it to give preference to applications (the default in XP pro)... no use.

 

please help! what i do now is to restart every time after retrospec runs. seems to be faster than to wait for all applications to get loaded back into memory.