Emulator Trouble. Well, Not Just Emulator Trouble...

I'm having trouble with my emulators. Considering that Genesis, SNES and NES games are the only things I play on my PC these days, I haven't noticed this problem with anything else other than explorer. I'm running a fairly powerful PC on Windows XP with plenty of RAM and tonnes of disk space. I leave my computer on for the majority of the day, and after a couple of hours, everything slows down to a halt. It's especially annoying when I try to load up one of my emulators, because all of my games run very, very slowly, and they're quite unplayable. I can play them with no trouble for about two hours, but after this time period, everything seems to go to pot, as they say.

I've tried increasing my virtual memory, I have enough RAM and HD space, and I don't have any sort of viruses, so I don't see what the problem is. Basically, if someone can help me make my emulators work at full speed, even when my computer's been on for hours, I would be grateful.

The problem isn't with the emulators themselves, either, because it's happening to all of my programs.

Can anyone suggest anything?

I'd simply suggest rebooting your computer every once in awhile. Windows does crazy things when it's been running too long. I'm not familiar with how the PC divvies up its RAM, but Macs allot chunks of memory to different programs, which ends up resulting in "fragmenting" of memory if you run it too long, unless you either close all your programs and reopen them or break down and reboot the machine. I'd imagine Windows probably uses a similar method of implementation. I'm not sure if that's at all akin to the problem you're having here, but it might be.

Good luck, in any case.

You're using WinXP and supposedly have plenty of ram and page file space, therefore rebooting will only be a short term solution :p (*has had XP up for 25 days and running still right now* :p )

It's going to be some program of some sort that's running that's eating up all the resources.

Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up the task manager, and click the Processes tab, to get a list of everything running on the PC. Being in an account with Admin priviledges helps, since you can see more hidden stuff :p

Then basically look down the list for anything that seems to be using unhealthy amount. of CPU cycles, or more RAM than you think should be necessary for such a program - it might be that that program has a memory leak or something. You might need to go to View > Select Columns in the menu to make some of this data appear, I'm not sure which ones are default since I have almost all of them visible ^_^ You might also see stuff running you thought you'd closed earlier but they didn't, for some reason - they'll be eating resources too.

Anyway, once you've found the culprit, if you know what the program is and think it's safe to kill it there and then, select it and click the End Process button to kill it, which should free it's memory and CPU cycles up. If the user for that program says SYSTEM or LOCAL/NETWORK SERVICE, it's probably not safe to kill it - if the username belongs to you or another normal user account on the machine, then it might be safe :p