Taskmanager questions

[jaybird]

I am running windows xp on both of my computers, one of
which is running very slow. I noticed on the good
machine a PF USAGE of 159mb And on the bad one a usage of
510 mb. What exactly does the PF USAGE show and what is
it's function? I would also appreciate any more info on
interpeting task mgr data. These readings are with only
the desktop showing and no windows open. Thanks

 

[Wesley Vogel]

PF USAGE = Page File

Everything you wanted to know...

Virtual Memory in Windows XP
http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[Alex Nichol]

I am running windows xp on both of my computers, one of
which is running very slow. I noticed on the good
machine a PF USAGE of 159mb And on the bad one a usage of
510 mb. What exactly does the PF USAGE show and what is
it's function?

It shows really a *potential* use of page file space. This may include
actual use by pages that have been paged out to make room, but it also
covers assignment of pages of virtual memory that programs have asked to
have allocated, but have not brought into use. There is no point in
assigning these to actual RAM and locking that out until the program
uses them - which may well be never. Some programs grab very large
slices in this way.

As such it is pretty useless except in assessing if the present maximum
size for the page file is adequate (and there is no downside in having
that far bigger than needed). The actual file itself may well be
nowhere near the size of the 'Usage' - mine is currently the initial
100MB; the Usage is showing 312 MB. Actual use is probably around 20MB.
Read more at my page www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm and use the tool
linked from it to find what actual use is being made. If that is high
one common cause is installing one of the programs that purports to
'manage' or 'free up' memory. If you have such a thing throw it out -
hard