Avoiding the System Resource Bog

Keeping Your Computer Running Quickly While Animating

We've all experienced it: while working on our computers, things begin to run abysmally slow, and no matter how many programs we close, nothing seems to speed things up. Programs start locking and freezing, and eventually we're forced to reboot--either voluntarily or by a sudden system crash prefaced by the infamous Blue Screen of Death. (Let's have a momentary pause while our Apple, Linux, and Unix-using readers take a minute to point and laugh.) This can be a real pain when you're animating, especially if you're working in 3D and rendering a long, detailed file that takes up a great deal of system resources on its own.

Can You Avoid Bogging Down Your Computer's Resources?
There are ways around it. One way to free up resources for your animation is to close any programs that you don't desperately need open; yes, that includes your media player with the playlist of 5,000 MP3s that you just can't animate without listening to.Burn them to a CD and plug them into your stereo or portable CD player instead, or better yet, move them onto your MP3 player. You'd be amazed at how much of your computer's resources are eaten up by programs like media players, chat and IM programs, browser sessions and browser plugins, and mail clients. Unless you have an extremely powerful processor, odds are you're bogging down your system just by going a little overboard on the multitasking. Close down anything you don't need to get the job done. Odds are you'll work faster without the distractions anyway.

Watch Out for Sneaky Hidden Processes.
Another thing that could be eating up your resources is background processes. Sometimes when you close a program, it isn't completely closed; the program window may be gone, but depending on the program settings it may still have left a process or two running in the background. You may also have other processes scheduled to run on their own, that you might have forgotten about; and in the worst-case scenario, you could be dealing with some rather nasty spyware, which will happily spawn dozens upon dozens of memory-eating processes just for the fun of dragging your computer into the slow-motion mud. For the latter, your best bet is to run a good spyware-cleaning program, such as LavaSoft's Ad-Aware or Yahoo's Toolbar with Anti-Spy.

For other processes, however, just try opening your task manager and clicking on the "Processes" tab; while you should really ignore any processes run by user name "SYSTEM" (or the equivalent) unless you're entirely familiar with each process running on your system, you should check all the others. Look for unfamiliar processes that don't seem to be associated with any programs running, and check to see their CPU usage and memory usage. You may just find your culprits there, and killing those processes by clicking "End Task" could clear up your system for the time being. If you aren't sure what you should do or if you should close it, Google the file name with extension included and you'll probably find out fast enough.

Be Aware That These are Only Short-Term Fixes.
It's a possibility that those tricks will magically fix everything, but it may only be a short-term solution; the memory-eating process could be set to respawn itself. Even if it's not, it could restart when you reboot your computer; so while the short-term solution works as a quick fix, you should still try to trace the process back to the root program and find a way to disable it. (A quick and easy way to do this is to plug the filename into your search function, which should lead you to the folder of the program that it's associated with.)

Know What Your System is Capable of, and be Ready to Clean it Out.
If none of the quick fixes are working, you should really consider your system's capabilities in contrast to the system requirements of the software you're using. If your computer barely has enough power to run the software, it's going to drag a lot regardless of what you do to clear up system resources. If, however, you have more than enough power and yet you still can't seem to free your computer of tangles of resource-hogs that refuse to release their stranglehold, you may have to fall on the last resort: backing up all your files to disk and external hard drive, before completely wiping your system drive and restoring it to its original state.