Excess RAM..A Way to use all of it?

[Guest]

I have 2 Gig of RAM but seldom use 1 G. Is there a way to force a prgram to
use all of the available RAM and increase performance? Note that the CPU
usage does often use 100% of the CPU

 

[Leonard Grey]

You cannot force a program to use more RAM. Note that CPU use and RAM
use are not necessarily connected.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I have 2 Gig of RAM but seldom use 1 G.

That's not particularly surprising. 2GB of RAM is *way* more than most
people running XP can make effective use of. Despite the advice of
those who say that more RAM means better performance, that is true
only up to a point. 2GB is considerably past that point for almost
everyone.

What apps do you run? Unless you do things like video editing or
editing large photographic images, even 1GB is way more than
necessary. For normal business applications, most people see no
performance gains by going past 512MB, and often even 256MB is enough.

Is there a way to force a prgram to
use all of the available RAM and increase performance?

No. How much RAM a program uses depends on the size of the program and
the size of the data files it is using. You can't change that, and
even if you could, it would not increase performance.

Note that the CPU
usage does often use 100% of the CPU

That's a different matter entirely and unrelated to RAM usage.
However, if CPU usage is often 100%, something is seriously wrong with
your system, and I suspect that you are infested with malware.

 

[Guest]

Thank you, I probably overkilled but the Gig was about $50 at Fry's, and it
satisfied my obsessive compulsive ADHD side....

As a law firm, we do alot of document scanning into Adobe 8.0, and in that
program scrolling from page to page seems to take a long time. Also we OCR
the documents and use X-1 to search for documents, etc.

the scrolling speed has not been helpped from what I can tell, and it is too
early on the X-1 program. Checking with AVG 7.5, Registry Cleaner, and X-1
Webroot all seem to be slightly faster.

Thanks.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Thank you,

You're welcome. Glad to help.

 

[Guest]

Just try to set your Virtual Memory in the System Properties, Performance
Option, to "No Paging File", this setting is not recommended for computer
with less than 1 GB of RAM.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Just try to set your Virtual Memory in the System Properties, Performance
Option, to "No Paging File", this setting is not recommended for computer
with less than 1 GB of RAM.

No, this setting is not recommended for *anyone*. The result would be
that you would not be able to use all the RAM you have.

The reason is that Windows pre-allocates virtual memory without
actually using it, in advance of its possibly needing it. This speeds
up actual use if the need occurs later. Without a page file, that
allocation can only be made in real RAM, and that effectively locks
that RAM out of any other potential use.

For more information, read this excellent article by the late MVP Alex
Nichol, "Virtual Memory in Windows XP" at
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[frodo]

XP will use all avail RAM, always; you don't need to do a thing. At the
very least it will use "extra" ram to cache up the disk drive.

Don't be mislead by the Task Manager display of "Available RAM". It's
"available", but not "unused" or "free". It is being put to good use,
don't worry about it.