Handle LeakFollow

Random background information: My computer has been getting slower and slower over the last few days/weeks.
---------------------------------

I'm not sure if I have pinpointed my problem, but under the task manager it says my amount of "Handles" is up to 227,000, which from what websites I have kind of skimmed over, seems way too high. So I'm wondering if I have a Handle leak or whatever you'd call it.

My question is: Could this be my problem? What is a handle? (lol) How do I view these handles to try to figure out which program is possibly causing the leak?

I'm nowhere near tech savvy, so be gentle with your words. >.>

54 processes.

Some of the stuff I use: Ad-Aware, CCleaner, HijackThis, Spybot - Search and Destroy, and I think McAfee is my system protection thing but I never really use it. My first inkling was when I compared with a friend of mine and he had more Processes and Threads running but I beat him out in handles by about 200,000. I used every program in my ******* to check for the bad stuff and always got nothing. I'm kind of at a loss right now.

Edit: At about 344,000 handles now.

Edited, Jan 24th 2009 12:58pm by BLMTylerm

Yesterday svchost was hogging up 90%+ of the cpu, idk if it was just an update going on or what but it lasted until I restarted my computer, but now it's PlayOnline because FFXI is running.

Just me on the users page.

384,000 Handles. Lol.

How much ram do you have in that box? Also, have you found any indications your computer might be infected? try malwarebytes too.

You've either got a memory leak in a running program or driver, or your system is low enough on HDD or memory resources that it is just never getting enough free resources to get ahead of its boot backlog.

Wait. you have 384mb total in that machine? That's it?

You need more ram immidiatly. I'd reccommend at least 2GB, especially since ram is dirt cheap. Download CPUz from here http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php, run it and tell me what it says on the Motherboard and Memory tabs and i'll tell you what type of ram you will need.

The latest windows XP security patches increased how much memory Windows XP requires to run somewhat. That's probably what youa re running into here.

Dear god how do you even run FFXI on that?? Is that computer like 10 years old?

This is what I believe you should by. Since I dont know the speed of your ram I cant say for sure but im sure someone will correct me. Corsair makes some good ram and that ram has a
$40 rebate with it.

Someone correct me if im wrong on my ram choice please.

Edit: I'm assuming you have kind of Emachine?

Edited, Jan 26th 2009 2:03pm by Alobont

I know 512 will run it but man that is so low.