Thomas
I am not familiar with Rainmeter but looking at some screenshots I
suspect you have to be careful to properly understand what is being
measured. Few tools measure pagefile usage and the screenshot I saw
suggests Rainmeter is no different in this respect. What they measure is
allocations of available pagefile to programmes and not how much the
programmes make use of those allocations.
You can get more accurate information on pagefile usage using
pagefilemon, a small freeware utility.
Use page file monitor to observe what is the peak usage. Start it to run
immediately after start-up and look at the log. Pagefilemon takes
snapshots. You need to run it at the beginning of the session at then
run it again at intervals throughout the sessions. The log is Pagefile
log.txt. If you right click on the file in Windows Explorer and select
Send to, Desktop (Create Shortcut). The same applies to
XP_PageFileMon.exe.
A small utility to monitor pagefile usage:
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm
Note that programs using undo features, particularly those associated
with graphics and photo editing, require large amounts of memory so if
you use this type of programme check these first observing how the page
usage increases when they start and whether the usage decreases when you
close the programme.
"How do I get my computer to use more ram and less swap/pagefile?" This
is not something that you can easily do and not the way users tackle
this issue. The normal approach to resolving problem of slow performance
when it is memory related is to reduce memory usage or to add RAM
memory. A computer will generally use RAM memory before making use of
the pagefile. However, there are a limited number of activities that
require the pagefile as you will see if you run pagefilemon.
To reduce pagefile usage you need to look at what programmes load on
booting the computer and whether they can be used on an on demand basis.
Two commonly used programmes are responsible for many poor performance
complaints and these are Norton (Symantec) and McAfee Security software.
Many users have seen performance dramatically improve by substituting
freeware alternatives and saved money as a bonus.
Autoruns (freeware) is a useful tool for looking at what loads on start
up.
A safer way than msconfig to disable / remove unwanted start up items is
to use Autoruns.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/Autoruns.mspx
With Autoruns you can uncheck an item, which disables it from starting,
or you can can right click an item and then delete it. If you uncheck
you can recheck to re-enable the item. It is a much safer approach than
editing the Registry. Another useful feature of the programme is that
you can right click an item and select Search Online to get information
about the item selected.
A final comment. Do not leave your computer on 24/7. If you have
programmes with a memory leak the memory they use is not released when
you close them. It is only released by restarting the computer.
--
Hope this helps.
Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
