Dingo said:
Hi. Am running WinXP-Home on a Pentium 4 processor with 80GB hard drive and
256MB of memory.
Even when I have no programs running the system information section says I
only have 50 to 60MB's of memory left. That can't be right can it?
I only have about 30 Apps and utilities installed and NO games at all.
Should I be concerned? My virtual memory says Total Virtual Memory is
873.04MB And Available virtual mem is 493.50MB Any suggestions to a <
Thanks. Dingo
Hi Dingo.
There is no problem at all.
Available memory should really be described as *useless* memory
because that is what it really represents - memory for which the
Windows Memory Manager has so far been totally unable to find any use
for.
The Memory Manager will, by design, always attempt to find some use,
any use whatever so long as it might conceivably be of some benefit,
for every bit of RAM in the computer rather than just leave that RAM
sitting there idly going to rot.
And just as soon as some better use comes along for any of that RAM
then the Memory Manager will instantaneously drop the more trivial
usages so as to free up whatever is now required.
The really important figure with respect to memory management in
Windows XP is one that is not even reported by any of the built-in
tools. That figure is the amount of paging file activity that is
occurring. That is, how much (if any) active memory content has been
moved from RAM to the paging file in order to allow that RAM to be
used for other, currently more important, tasks.
The significance of this figure is that it provides a method of
assessing the potential benefit from adding more RAM. The primary
effect of adding more RAM is that it will eliminate, or at least
reduce, the need to move active memory pages to the paging file. So
if there is no activity of that kind occurring with the present amount
of RAM then adding more RAM is not likely to provide much of a
performance benefit.
A free utility to measure the actual amount of used space in the
paging file can be downloaded from
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm or from
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/
If that utility reports more than 50 mb of actual page file being used
on a regular basis then that indicates fairly extensive paging
activity and a RAM upgrade is going to provide some performance
benefits.
Hope this clarifies the situation.
Good luck
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."
