Hi, I have been using 2 bg or ram sicne I built this system in 2006 (2 sticks of 1gb corsair xms2, 800ram)
and I noticed lately that while playing games like company of heores, and cc2 demo I have been going over the 2gb memory mark, so after i eneded a game i see a peak of lets say 2160mb or 2270mb ram used, and I did not see any new apps using the resources, I also uave to say that i think my task manager reports a bit off ram usage readings for my web browser...a bit odd, lets say it states that 20 or 40 mb's used for ie, but when i look at teh graph i can see a clear increase in ram used by a 100 or more, so something is fishy...i checked for viruses and such...nothign found. and I also use peer guardian, and spybot, with northons security package(antivirus, and internet security) ...to be tad safer,

what ingame options do dramaically increase use of ram? i know the textures, but anything else? somethign that i could live without and wouldnt see much difference, but does use up lots of ram?

Because of this I was thinking about geting more ram....but lately the 2x 512 is almost same in price as a 2x1 gb...but im using win xp...and i heard that 4bg is not going to work with a 32bit os.....so would there be any point in geting aditional 2bg or ram? will the pc not work at all or just utilize only 3 gb out of 4?.....got out of the loop with hardware a while ago

my specs : e6600, 2900xt (512), 2gb corsair ram, asus p5w dx deluxe, sync master 226BW monitor

Thank You for replys.

Do you have your pagefile turned off? You should not be using that much ram. Norton does have a large resource footprint. I upgraded from 2gb to 4gb. Task manager reports 3573mb. I have had no problems with my system.

i have the pagefile turned on, the issue is that i did not have this problem really before, so for somereazon somethign is eating up more memory than before, and i really dont want to use the paged memory

Are you using Firefox for a browser? Firefox 2 has issues with releasing memory. Other than that spyware. But you stated you ran tests for that. I'm sorry that's all I have.

Run a virus Scan, and malware check. other then that, you may have to do a reinstall of the OS, if you can't find the culprit.

download a copy of the latest norton systemworks and run windoctor as well. It'll double check a lot of things for you. Open msconfig and disable anything you dont recognize- you could disable everything but your drivers may have an issue here and there like sound and video.

XP shouldn't use more than 2 GB unless you're running a distributed computed computing as a process by accident, or like the others said - memory leak like crazy.

i checked it all...could it be maby somethign with my gpu? that its memory might have just died somehow and its being sent to the systems ram? ok only thign i found odd was teh "call of jaurez driver"...something, i uninstalled tha tgame without playing it assoon i knew it was starforce infested...long ago. but it seems that it left somethignbehind in the processes. so thats gone.

and to be honest i hav eno clue what else it might be, i usually got below 2bg in the past while gaming, but now its 2260 sometimes and once playing company of heroes i got 2300'ish......and i would prezume that my gpu should be able to handle the game fine without needing much ram (2900xt), spent most of teh day today checking things on the net, and the ssytem for simmilar things, and nothing really came up.
finished rescanning the system again, and just finished defragging, ill run the game again, maby in some way the lack of defragmentaiotn was an issue(it was only 20% fragmented though)

no, i use the MSN IE, and i checked it , in teh task bar in the processes it takes withthe messenger about 60 mb's and when i check the performance and exit teh IE i get more than a 100bm's drop in teh use of ram, so it seems that one or the other reports it way off the actual value.

Pull up the task manager and go to processes. Check the "Show processes from all users" box, and take a screenshot. Make sure you take it when your memory is running out, so we can have an idea of what's causing it.

Try looking at your memory running in safe mode, then run programs and see how much they take up. Make sure the numbers line up - they may be launching additional programs with themselves.
Even if, that's a ridiculously high amount of RAM used up...I don't ever get that high, even playing those same games. Are you sure you don't have 60 million background programs running? Is your system tray taking up half your screen?

use the msconfig utility to get rid of unneeded startup programs.
all else fails, reinstall windows.

In answer to your other question, yes, you can run 4 gigs or ram with XP. The OS will only address about 3.25gb but M$ says that the system will still use the additional ram. In short they say even a 32 bit system will see improvements with 4gb of ram.

I'd like to see a link to that, if you can find one.

Download Windows Sysinternals Process Explorer v11.11, it is an MS power tool. Click View -> Select Columns -> Process Memory and choose what you want to see. It has peak memory usage etc. etc. etc., if you can't find the memory hog in there, then give up and reload the OS. I'm certain, with a little work, you can find it.

@ Zorg

Thanks for posting the link for Sysinternals Process Explorer.
It is a great utility tool.

Thanks, I really haven't done it justice personally. I really should sit down with it for about 4-5 hours. It seems that the more you dig into it, the more stuff that you find it does.

In case anyone is interested, there are a lot of seriously high powered utilities covering all kinds of things at Windows Sysinternals. Additionally, many have gotten a lot more user friendly than they were in the past.