I'm not sure which forum to put this in, as I don't know what's causing the problem.

I have a new Quad 4 Dell Inspiron 530 running XP. It has 4MB memory (I think XP uses 3MB of it). I get a lot of news-related newsletters from various sources, and like to open all the articles of interest to me in separate windows to read them (as opposed to reading each one as I open it, and then closing it before opening the next one).

I find that after I have 33 such windows open, the computer stops responding to any mouse commands to open a new window, be it in IE, or any other program like Word. If I connect a camera to download pictures, it realizes that I have added hardware. asks me what I want to do (I choose the Camera Wizard), and nothing happens. At that stage, it will not even respond if I doubleclick on the new hardware icon in my system tray to remove the camera safely.

According to the SIW utility that I have running that shows me the CPU and ram usage, I am barely using 1-2% of the CPU, and using about 57% of memory (1873MB used, 1445MB free), and it says that of the 2046mb swapfile, the maximum used is 356mb and 179mb is in use.

Once I close the windows, the machine works just fine.  It allows me to open the same number of windows that I have closed.

 

Likewise, if I use tabbed browsing in IE7, it opens about 46 or so tabs, and then stops opening either any more tabs, any more windows, or any other programs.

 

It's not a problem of stability.

What could be causing this, and what can I do about it?  At this stage, it is more a case of intellectual curiosity than anything else, as I'd like to know what could be limiting the system, particularly given the amount of free memory.

 

TIA.