RAM and Page File

[Guest]

My laptop has 512MB of RAM installed. When I use DxDiag it says that I only
have about 382 MB.

What is the problem here?


Also, why is my page file usage so high?

It's at 633M/92M the peak commit charge was 880204k.


I have scvhost.exe running about 6 times.

What is wrong with my RAM and Page File usage?

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

My laptop has 512MB of RAM installed. When I use DxDiag it says
that I only have about 382 MB.

Probably 384MB, not 382.

Instead of a separate video card, you have on-board video, and it uses 128MB
of your system RAM as video memory.

What is the problem here?

None at all. It's perfectly normal in the situation. Whether 384MB is enough
for you to get decent performance depends on what apps you run.

Also, why is my page file usage so high?

It's at 633M/92M the peak commit charge was 880204k.

Please don't make the mistake of confusing page file use with page file
allocation. They are not the same thing. Far and away the best piece on the
page file written is this article by the late MVP Alex Nichol: "Virtual
Memory in Windows XP" at http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php I recommend
you read this to better understand how all this works.

To find out how much page you actually use (as opposed to allocate), go to
http://billsway.com/notes_public/winxp_tweaks/ and download
WinXP-2K_Pagefile.zip to monitor your pagefile usage.

I have scvhost.exe running about 6 times.

Perfectly normal.

 

[Ed Metcalfe]

Probably 384MB, not 382.

Instead of a separate video card, you have on-board video, and it uses
128MB of your system RAM as video memory.




None at all. It's perfectly normal in the situation. Whether 384MB is
enough for you to get decent performance depends on what apps you run.




Please don't make the mistake of confusing page file use with page file
allocation. They are not the same thing. Far and away the best piece on
the page file written is this article by the late MVP Alex Nichol:
"Virtual Memory in Windows XP" at http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php I
recommend you read this to better understand how all this works.

To find out how much page you actually use (as opposed to allocate), go to
http://billsway.com/notes_public/winxp_tweaks/ and download
WinXP-2K_Pagefile.zip to monitor your pagefile usage.




Perfectly normal.

Further to Ken's recommendation on page file information I can also highly
recommend this video:

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/itsshowtime/sessionh.aspx?videoid=64

Although it is aimed at troubleshooting memory problems (which, as Ken has
said, you don't actually have) it has a very good explanation of Windows
memory management topics.

Ed Metcalfe.