Need help adjusting memory parameters (too much swapping)

[Robert Dodier]

Hi everybody,

I got a Toshiba laptop recently w/ Windows Vista Basic installed,
1.86 GHz Celeron cpu, 512 M RAM, 70 G disk (about 50% free).

I was running several programs this afternoon (IE, Media Player,
Windows explorer, a few others) and it got into a state in which
it was swapping continuously and not attending to key strokes
and mouse clicks. Eventually (30 minutes) I was able to close all
the programs and it settled down --- no swapping, responsive again.

I wonder if there are some options I can change on the Control Panel
to help it avoid thrashing like that again. Is it feasible to just
disable
swapping altogether? Buying some more physical memory is not
a big deal, but I suspect that might not be the end of the story ---
I'm afraid it will just eat up more memory and keep thrashing if there
is more present. Anyway if someone has some
words of wisdom, I'm all ears.

Thanks for your help,

Robert Dodier

 

[Michael Solomon]

Hi everybody,

I got a Toshiba laptop recently w/ Windows Vista Basic installed,
1.86 GHz Celeron cpu, 512 M RAM, 70 G disk (about 50% free).

I was running several programs this afternoon (IE, Media Player,
Windows explorer, a few others) and it got into a state in which
it was swapping continuously and not attending to key strokes
and mouse clicks. Eventually (30 minutes) I was able to close all
the programs and it settled down --- no swapping, responsive again.

I wonder if there are some options I can change on the Control Panel
to help it avoid thrashing like that again. Is it feasible to just
disable
swapping altogether? Buying some more physical memory is not
a big deal, but I suspect that might not be the end of the story ---
I'm afraid it will just eat up more memory and keep thrashing if there
is more present. Anyway if someone has some
words of wisdom, I'm all ears.

Thanks for your help,

Robert Dodier

Nothing short of increasing the amount of memory on that laptop is going to
accomplish what you want. 512MB is way too low. at a bare minimum, you need
to double your memory and if your laptop has can accommodate it, you should
really consider increasing your memory to 2GB. All the more so as it's
quite likely, your graphics card is sharing memory with main system memory
as opposed to having memory of its own.

 

[David]

Hi everybody,

I got a Toshiba laptop recently w/ Windows Vista Basic installed,
1.86 GHz Celeron cpu, 512 M RAM, 70 G disk (about 50% free).

I was running several programs this afternoon (IE, Media Player,
Windows explorer, a few others) and it got into a state in which
it was swapping continuously and not attending to key strokes
and mouse clicks. Eventually (30 minutes) I was able to close all
the programs and it settled down --- no swapping, responsive again.

I wonder if there are some options I can change on the Control Panel
to help it avoid thrashing like that again. Is it feasible to just
disable
swapping altogether? Buying some more physical memory is not
a big deal, but I suspect that might not be the end of the story ---
I'm afraid it will just eat up more memory and keep thrashing if there
is more present. Anyway if someone has some
words of wisdom, I'm all ears.

Thanks for your help,

Robert Dodier

if it will take it, put in 2 GB, but even 1 GB will help quite a bit.
however, it's a Celeron, so it's not really the speediest unit out
there, so expect a subpar overall experience running Vista. Better to
run it on a Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB of RAM. That hard drive is
also very small and when it gets down to a certain level of free space
you are gonna REALLY hate that computer.

 

[dennis@home]

Hi everybody,

I got a Toshiba laptop recently w/ Windows Vista Basic installed,
1.86 GHz Celeron cpu, 512 M RAM, 70 G disk (about 50% free).

I was running several programs this afternoon (IE, Media Player,
Windows explorer, a few others) and it got into a state in which
it was swapping continuously and not attending to key strokes
and mouse clicks. Eventually (30 minutes) I was able to close all
the programs and it settled down --- no swapping, responsive again.

I wonder if there are some options I can change on the Control Panel
to help it avoid thrashing like that again. Is it feasible to just
disable
swapping altogether? Buying some more physical memory is not
a big deal, but I suspect that might not be the end of the story ---
I'm afraid it will just eat up more memory and keep thrashing if there
is more present. Anyway if someone has some
words of wisdom, I'm all ears.

It doesn't just eat up memory although it will try and use it all by caching
disk in free RAM.
Swapping happens if there is not enough RAM to hold the working set of all
the programs you are running.
With Vista this is likely to exceed 1G and may exceed 2G even doing "office"
work.
500Mb just isn't enough and adding more memory is the only solution although
you could try adding a USB memory stick and enabling readyboost if you have
a fast one spare. YMMV

 

[R. McCarty]

Also a Celeron processor has less L2 Cache memory than it's
Core Duo equivalents. So when you multitask, a Celeron won't
always respond with instant/smooth operation.

 

[Mark Veldhuis]

Buying some more physical memory is not
a big deal,

That is the only thing you should do. 512 MB. is not enough to run Vista
comfortably. Get at least another 512 MB., preferably 1.5 GB. more, and
you'll notice a huge improvement.