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General discussion

who ate my RAM?

Mar 29, 2004 6:59PM PST

I am running a four-year old PC with a new pentium 4 2.0 Ghz processor, 256 MB of DDR266 RAM and an nVidia TNT2 with 32MB RAM.
I run Windows XP with service pack 1A. I also use cacheman, a utility that shows you how much RAM is used and free.
Cacheman shows me that over 55% of my total 256 MB RAM is being used when I have absolutely NO programs running.
Is something wrong with my machine or the memory sticks or is the application just inaccurate?
I cannot currently afford to upgrade my RAM.

Discussion is locked

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Hopefully there is no free RAM.
Mar 29, 2004 7:15PM PST

The memory article at http://www.aumha.org/articles.htm might help, but in VM based OSes, the idea is to have no free memory since such would be wasted memory. If one was to be able to keep 256M free out of 512M on a certain OS, what difference could there be if you had 0 bytes free on 256M? To limit the application/OS to keep free memory on a VM OS is well discussed and the idea of free memory is a DOS legacy item.

In short, RAM beats hard disk speed everytime. As such, try to use all the memory.

Bob

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Re:who ate my RAM?
Mar 29, 2004 11:49PM PST

The ram is always active(not idle) in a XP-OS system and at least some processes are running for XP housekeeping. Cacheman itself really isn't a good idea under any windoze OS becauses it wastes ram to do itself as well. XP provides a picture of what going on under its "task window" in effect just like cacheman many times it reports at 100%. Though you could use a ulitity that "optimizes" whatver installed pgms. and tasks are working for a cleaner system operation, such as Norton or I use TuneUp Ulitiies 2003 but also those from Ontrack SystemSuite, Aladin utilities(sp), etc. should do the job as well. So, don't rely to heavily in cachman, its days were for win95 and DOS.

good luck -----Willy

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Re:who ate my RAM?
Mar 30, 2004 8:14AM PST

"I have absolutely NO programs running". Well, you probably have many Services running. You may want to try visiting http://www.blkviper.com to get a handle on what Services are running, and what (in his opinion) should be turned off. By default, XP turns on many unneeded Services. Just make sure you keep track of any changes you make in the event you need to reverse the process. You may also want to google "optimizing XP" for tips on how to make the most of your 256 megs. Ideally, imo, you should have a minimum of 512, but depending on the applications you run, you may get by with 256. When you can afford it, I strongly suggest you upgrade at least another 256. Good luck.

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Re:who ate my RAM?
Mar 30, 2004 8:26PM PST
Cacheman shows me that over 55% of my total 256 MB RAM is being used when I have absolutely NO programs running

You can check via the command prompt by typing net start which give a list of all active services.