1G bytes of ram.

[Chris Lanier]

No, plain and simple. 1GB of RAM is overkill for most computer users
anyway. but all memory managers do is take up that memory you are trying to
save.

 

[Mark Salloway]

Hi Mr .x
No you don't need another program, Windows memory management on XP can deal
with upto a max of 4Gb's of ram fine on its own. Any sort of memory utility
will almost certainly be a waste of money.

 

[Ken Blake]

In

I have 1G bytes of ram.
should I have a program that help me handle this memory ?

You presumably already have such a program. It's called Windows
XP. Nothing else is needed or desirable.

 

[Charlie]

No nothing else is needed. WindowsXP "manages the memory" just fine by it's
default installed state and nothing can improve on that especially with 1G
of ram.

List of 10 Cyber Legends and Hoaxes....

1. Ram Boosters
2. Ram Defraggers
3. Modem Boosters
4. "Pro" disk defraggers
5. Download Boosters
6. Cable modem "uncapping"
7. Free satellite TV
8. Free porno
9. Free anything else just about and lastly but certainly not leastly is
10. "Penis enlargement pills" are all about the same worth and
usefulness....zilch..nada..zero..etc etc....

 

[Mr. x]

Hello,
I have 1G bytes of ram.
should I have a program that help me handle this memory ?

Thanks

 

[David Jones]

I disagree. It is becoming more and more common for
certain types of applications (new 3D games, video/photo
editing, etc) to be able to effectively use 1 GB of RAM.

Granted, if all you do is word processing/office type
applications, 1 GB is overkill, but it's no longer a
blanket statement.

"Memory Managers" are horrid, shoddy applications that
actually hurt performance, I agree there. Best to let
the OS do its job.

 

[Larc]

| I disagree. It is becoming more and more common for
| certain types of applications (new 3D games, video/photo
| editing, etc) to be able to effectively use 1 GB of RAM.
|
| Granted, if all you do is word processing/office type
| applications, 1 GB is overkill, but it's no longer a
| blanket statement.

You are correct. When I moved from 512MB to 1GB of RAM, use of the pagefile was
cut dramatically. Manipulation of large graphics files in Photoshop is much
smoother.

Larc



§§§ - Please raise temperature of mail to reply by e-mail - §§§

 

[David Jones]

You'd be surprised at how many people actually do
Quite right though, he's already got it, not really an
argument at this point.

 

[djs]

x-no-archive: yes

No nothing else is needed. WindowsXP "manages the memory" just fine
by it's default installed state and nothing can improve on that
especially with 1G of ram.

List of 10 Cyber Legends and Hoaxes....

1. Ram Boosters
2. Ram Defraggers
3. Modem Boosters
4. "Pro" disk defraggers
5. Download Boosters
6. Cable modem "uncapping"
7. Free satellite TV
8. Free porno
9. Free anything else just about and lastly but certainly not leastly
is
10. "Penis enlargement pills" are all about the same worth and
usefulness....zilch..nada..zero..etc etc....

You just burst about four of my favorite bubbles!

 

[Ken Blake]

In

I disagree. It is becoming more and more common for
certain types of applications (new 3D games, video/photo
editing, etc) to be able to effectively use 1 GB of RAM.

Granted, if all you do is word processing/office type
applications, 1 GB is overkill, but it's no longer a
blanket statement.

If he had said "1GB of RAM is overkill for *all* computer users,"
I'd agree with you. But he said "most," not "all." And he's
correct. The vast majority of Windows XP users don't do anything
that would make use of 1GB of RAM, and that much RAM would be
wasted on most people's computers.

--
Ken Blake
Please reply to the newsgroup

 

[Alex Nichol]

Hello,
I have 1G bytes of ram.
should I have a program that help me handle this memory ?

No. 'Memory managers' are generally snake oil that at best have a
cosmetic effect. Read up at www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm. Your 1GB
may well be overkill, so I would suggest setting the initial page file
size down, to say 100MB or even 50MB, while leaving the Maximum value
up. And that is really to save the disk space.

 

[djs]

x-no-archive: yes

No. 'Memory managers' are generally snake oil that at best have a
cosmetic effect. Read up at www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm. Your 1GB
may well be overkill, so I would suggest setting the initial page file
size down, to say 100MB or even 50MB, while leaving the Maximum value
up. And that is really to save the disk space.

This sounds like great advice. However, I also have 1-GB of RAM, and
when I set my page file settings to 50-MB/4,096-MB (min/max), WinXP sees
fit to simply make my paging file 1,535 MB, no if's and's or but's about
it. In other words, it ignores my "50-MB" minimum completely. Thus, I
have had to set my min and max to an artificially low, equivalent value,
which I hate doing.

The really irritating thing is that I *never* have more than 600-MB of
memory in use--EVER. Windows still sucks at memory management, it would
seem. Otherwise, why would it insist on having a 1.5-GB paging file,
while there is still 400- to 500-MB of RAM available?

 

[Ron Martell]

The really irritating thing is that I *never* have more than 600-MB of
memory in use--EVER. Windows still sucks at memory management, it would
seem. Otherwise, why would it insist on having a 1.5-GB paging file,
while there is still 400- to 500-MB of RAM available?

Windows XP maps the *unused* portions of memory allocation requests to
the paging file. Application programs and Windows components
normally overstate their memory requirements and therefore some, and
often a great deal, of the requested memory is never actually used.

By mapping the unused portions to the paging file this allows RAM to
be used only for those parts of the requests that are actually being
used.

These unused portions can easily aggregate to several hundred
megabytes on a heavily used system.

Hope this clarifies the situation.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

 

[djs]

x-no-archive: yes

Windows XP maps the *unused* portions of memory allocation requests to
the paging file. Application programs and Windows components
normally overstate their memory requirements and therefore some, and
often a great deal, of the requested memory is never actually used.

By mapping the unused portions to the paging file this allows RAM to
be used only for those parts of the requests that are actually being
used.

These unused portions can easily aggregate to several hundred
megabytes on a heavily used system.

Hope this clarifies the situation.

Whatever the explanation, the reality is that XP handles memory terribly
on many large-memory systems like mine, at least with some applications.
Try running NewsBin Pro with a large amount of newsgroup headers, for
example. On my system, you'll see 700 MB of memory free, and the hard
disk light on constantly. Whatever "legitimate" reason there is for
the, in actual practice it blows.

 

[djs]

x-no-archive: yes

You can check for actual usage of the page file with a free utility
from http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/

That will show you how much, if any, of the page file consists of
active memory pages that have been moved out from RAM.

With 700 mb of unused memory that value should be zero or close to it.

And unless you find a significant amount of actual page file being
used then there must be something else that is causing the disk
activity.

Yep, I've been using the VBS script for quite awhile. Right now, my
paging file (which is manually set to 128/128) is fully used (well, it
reports "127 MB" use). And I have just under 600 MB of RAM in use,
about 400 MB free. Mine is not an isolated report of this kind of
thing, FWIW.

 

[djs]

Or you have incorrect settings for the paging file. You need a modest
amount as initial size, but still a *large* max one. That allows
those 'never used' pages to be assigned to that potential space. It
sounds to me that you have a small Max as well as small initial, so
that when a program allots itself a couple of hundred MB that it will
never use this is coming out of real RAM, locking it out, and leaving
the system desperately trying to use what little RAM is left by
paging it frantically to your little bit of pagefile. Or even that
you have no pagefile in effect at all, so that the system is
constantly dropping code out of RAM and reloading it next moment from
the original .exe file.

But "what little RAM is left" is always at least *half* of what I have
installed! I wouldn't call 512 MB a "little" amount of RAM left. And
even if I totally disable the page file, my memory use never climbs
above 600 MB (and that's during *hard* use). (But it turns out I can't
totally disable it, because then some performance counters (PerfOS)
freak out and get disabled. So, I set it as small as I can, which WinXP
makes a frustrating experience.)

Right now I am running 16MB/16MB and life is fine. As it turns out, I
can't set it to 2MB/2MB, or anything under 16MB/16MB, or WinXP will
ignore the setting and make the page file 1.5 GB. I know what you are
going to say... "Set it to 16MB/2048MB", but if I do that, my page file
*will* grow to at least 256MB, and I'll *still* have 500-600 MB of RAM
free! In other words, if my system runs fine with the page file totally
disabled (or with it set to 16MB/16MB), that inarguably means that I
have enough RAM so that the page file should never be used. In still
other words, if I'm fine not to use a page file at all... why use one
at all?

 

[Al Dykes]

But "what little RAM is left" is always at least *half* of what I have
installed! I wouldn't call 512 MB a "little" amount of RAM left. And
even if I totally disable the page file, my memory use never climbs
above 600 MB (and that's during *hard* use). (But it turns out I can't
totally disable it, because then some performance counters (PerfOS)
freak out and get disabled. So, I set it as small as I can, which WinXP
makes a frustrating experience.)

Right now I am running 16MB/16MB and life is fine. As it turns out, I
can't set it to 2MB/2MB, or anything under 16MB/16MB, or WinXP will
ignore the setting and make the page file 1.5 GB. I know what you are
going to say... "Set it to 16MB/2048MB", but if I do that, my page file
*will* grow to at least 256MB, and I'll *still* have 500-600 MB of RAM
free! In other words, if my system runs fine with the page file totally
disabled (or with it set to 16MB/16MB), that inarguably means that I
have enough RAM so that the page file should never be used. In still
other words, if I'm fine not to use a page file at all... why use one
at all?

NT/w2k/XP is a real Virtual Memory operating system and the Microsoft
implemented it in a way that requires a swap file sized to be equal to
all the programs running in RAM. It gets very unhappy if swap isn't at
least this big. Task Manager (or perfmon) will tell you how much
memory and swap space you are using at any instant. Unless
you are running a major application, like Photoshop, or have
some app that has memory leaks you don't need more than 512 MB,
and maybe only 256MB ram. Look in Task Manager

NT and w2k default to ram+12MB (so for you 1024+12=1036MB) I haven't heard
that XP is any different.

I think variable swap space (min/max) is one of the poorer ideas Microsft
ever came up with. It produces horribly fragmented C drives and these
need a stand-alone defrag tool, which the free ones don't do.

I set machines up for people that need lots of ram. Here's
what I do;

Set up NT/w2k with the default swap space setting.

Go into Control Panel/System and set it to MIN and MAX to be the
same (and enough for our application, these days 1,500MB)

install a legal copy of a commercial defrag pruduct and
tell it to defrag everything, This requires a reboot.
There are lots of files that can't be defraged
while NT is running.

Once should do it, at least the swap space will never become
fragmented.

 

[Alex Nichol]

NT/w2k/XP is a real Virtual Memory operating system and the Microsoft
implemented it in a way that requires a swap file sized to be equal to
all the programs running in RAM. It gets very unhappy if swap isn't at
least this big.

That is not true in XP, at least as far as initial size goes.