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Why is my PC memory being sucked dry? (1 Viewer)

Alf S

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I've got a 2 year old HP Pavillion (Pentium 3, W2K, IE6)with 256mb of memory installed.

By chance I decided to look at Task Manager and noticed it said I have 260,000K Physical TOTAL Memory and as I type this, only 66,000K memory available. What's up with that?

Right now I'm just running IE, Norton Auto Protect, USRobotics V.92 call waiting, and an internet accecelator my ISP offered us to try call Propel Accelerator.

My StartUp programs have been weeded down to the bare minimum as well.

Are the programs I mentioned hogging my Memory? I've disable them and the memory still shows being very low.

I tried PC Pitstop, and it reported back that my PC is in great shape. I passed all tests including memory and internet speeds etc.

ANy thoughts?
 

Mark Shannon

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That seems to be the same problem with me. I have a custom built (P3 800mHz, WinME, IE6) also with 256MB installed. Currently, the only programs that are running (in the taskbar) are: IE6, MSN Messenger, FreeRAM XP Pro, and SystemSuite 5. Yet, I only have 40MB of free ram. IS that normal?
 

Tekara

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Robert
windows 2000 and windows XP improve performance by loading almost everything that they can into physical memory, that's why a majority of people will reccomend 512MB+ of memory for these operating systems.
 

Ken Chan

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The OS itself takes memory, plus it allocates some for disk caching and so forth. There's no point in having unused free memory, other than some sense of peace of mind. Let's say you paid for 2GB of RAM, and always had 1GB free. Seems like you bought twice as much as you need.

//Ken
 

John_Berger

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Let's say you paid for 2GB of RAM, and always had 1GB free. Seems like you bought twice as much as you need.
...which is infinitely better than not having enough. Plus that extra space can always be allocated to a RAM drive or some other function. So saying that it's more than needed is relative.

Windows has by far the worst memory management of any operating system out there anyway. "Oh, gee. We have 300 MB of memory free, but let's use the swap space on the hard drive anyway, even though it can be hundreds of times slower." Oh, yeah. That makes a lot of f**king sense. :rolleyes
 

Ken Chan

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Caching for application usage in the immediate future being one obvious reason.
Memory occupied by the cache is not unused. It is in fact being used by the cache....

Suppose you had all of the OS in memory that's currently being used, all of the active applications, all of their data, some chunks set aside for the disk cache, etc. You could still end up with genuinely unused memory.

Of course, you size the amount of memory you buy with your particular situation. And you always round up. But aside from genuine concerns about memory leaks and bloated apps, the memory is there to be used, because otherwise, you bought it for nothing.

As long as it's occasional, having to use the disk for virtual memory isn't the infinite tragedy you make it out to be. (RAM drives had their place back in the day, when you had extra extended memory you couldn't use for your apps, but nowadays it's not worth the effort for most people.)

//Ken
 

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