When Size Matters

I and another person, who is an IT professional, spent some time this weekend doing some volunteer work at a charity - more specifically, a homeless shelter and rehabilitation clinic, though any more details information isn't particularly relevant. Our task was to do "computer stuff", including basic maintenance on all their computers (those in the administration offices and those for use by residents), as well as take a look at what they had in storage.

While the computers available to residents weren't bad (about 5 years old or less), the situation in the office was more grim. Almost all of the computers were Pentium 3s and 4s, most with 256 megs of RAM and running Windows 2000 with Internet Explorer 6. That's right, Windows 2000 and IE6, which are both several years past end of life, and thus inherently insecure; oh, and did I mention that all the office staff run with admin privileges?

So, we started off with the easy stuff: chkdsk (full disk surface scan) and defrag on all of them. We intended to run virus scans on all of them, but were repeatedly thwarted by bad CD-ROM drives and stupid video cards that prevented us from using the AV boot disks I'd burned for the occasion (as I didn't trust the computers to not have rootkits), and eventually we had to resort on many computers to just running the AV from inside Windows.

While there were a few more specific problems with the computers, one universal complaint among the office staff was that the computers were anywhere from slow to extremely slow. While defrag no doubt helped a little with that (the computers were between 5 and 40% fragmented), the primary problem appeared to be something else entirely. Most of the computers had 256 megs of RAM, and on boot most of them were using anywhere from 210 to 260 megs of memory; add in 20 megs of memory for IE (I wanted to switch them to Firefox or a newer version of IE, but as both of those used significantly more memory that wasn't really an option), 30-40 megs for an Office app or two, and the observation that Windows starts disk-thrashing when you get to about 85% of physical memory used (about 220 megs), and it was clear that the computers were severely disk-thrashing.

So, memory upgrades were the obvious prescription. But that raises the question: why were the computers using so much memory to begin with? Anyone who remembers back from the day 10 years ago, including both myself and the other guy, can tell you that 256 megs should be plenty for Windows 2000 (and perhaps even XP). Given all the available evidence - that the computers ran Windows 2000 and IE6 in admin mode, our inability to do a proper virus scan on most of them, and the fact that there was a lot of unaccounted for memory (memory that was in use but not accounted for by running processes or kernel allocations) - naturally we assumed that they were severely infested with malware.

As irony would have it, the cause was actually just the opposite. On Sunday I finally got fed up with the situation, and decided to try a drastic experiment inspired with some experience in the past: I uninstalled the AVG Free antivirus that was on most of the computers. This experiment paid off; it turns out that AVG was in fact using a full 130 megs of memory. Without it, Windows was using about 80 megs of memory at boot, which is very much like what we remembered back from the day, when virus scanners took 30-40 megs, which would leave about 110 of the 256 megs available for running applications comfortably.

So... now what? Well, another 256 megs memory would put an end to the problem. But in the mean time, I had a stop-gap measure: get a smaller AV. Out of my previous tests on the best of the free AVs, the best current-generation AV in this regard was Avira AntiVir Personal, weighing in at about 95 megs. So, I switched all of the computers over to that. This reduced the amount of memory in use at boot to about 180 megs, leaving about 40 megs available for comfortably running applications. While that isn't a huge amount, I'm hoping that in a case this severe it will substantially improve performance until more memory can be acquired cheaply.

On that topic, I actually ordered a batch of used and very cheap 256 meg sticks off eBay, and I'm hoping to be able to test them out (which will take a couple days to thoroughly test this quantity of sticks) and get them installed this weekend or next, bringing the computers up to 512 megs; assuming, of course, that these computers (most of them Dells) aren't of the extremely finicky variety that reject all but very closely-matched memory. At 512 megs, it becomes reasonable to start looking at upgrading the computers to XP (pretty sure it wouldn't be a good idea to try Vista on those computers) and Firefox, which would go a long way to improving security (and, of course, at that point it would be worth making them not run as admin).

On one last note, one thing that continues to stump both of us is how on one computer the fonts in IE are enormous. On typical web pages lines of text are often 1-1.5 inches tall, making it extremely difficult to use the web. We both independently looked at both font settings and accessibility features in both IE and Windows, but none of those proved to be the cause. Setting fonts to smallest in IE made text more reasonable, but on some pages the text was actually "smallest", making it impossibly small to read; thus this was not a sufficient solution to the problem.