Alittle help with my memory allocation

[funkdog]

I have 2 Internet Explorer windows open, Bearshare, and Sisoft Sandra. I'm also running Zone Alarm as my firewall, with MSMGS loaded in the startup.

I have 128mb PC133 Ram, winblows is telling me that I only have 1% of physical memory left? Can that crap use so much memory? I've ordered another stick of 128 for giggles.

Is there something I'm missing that's sucking my memory? When clearing the startup bar in msconfig, I know there is one that is absolutely needed anyone know which one? And lastly I am managing my windows fake memory and set it to 128 minimum and 384 maximum, what settings do you guys recommend and why?

 

[Raystonn]

A good operating system will always use all available physical memory. Memory is first given to active applications. Then it is usef for disk caches to eliminate the harddrive as a bottleneck as much as possible. If your applications use more memory than you physically have available, the OS will not create many disk buffers to eliminate virtual memory use as much as possible.

-Raystonn

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

 

[funkdog]

Let me ask you this then, is Linux better at managing physical memory than Windows ME?

 

[Raystonn]

I haven't seen the source code for either and haven't run WinME. Thus I cannot answer that. Win 9x/ME use an obsolete kernel. I recommend Windows 2000.

-Raystonn

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

 

[Spdy_Gonzales]

I have two suggestions:

First, turn off the PCHealth function by going to settings/control panel/PCScheduler/PCHealth. Click on Schedule, then Advanced. Click the end date box and enter the current date. This will stop all that background activity that's taking place.

Second, set the virtual memory so that it is a permanent size. First, disable the virtual memory by checking the box. Restart your computer and then immeditely defrag the C: drive. Then go back to the virtual memory settings and make the minimum and maximum size the same. I recommend 128 (256 at the most), enable the virtual memory and restart your computer.

<b> Help stamp out reality </font color=orange>

 

[Ncogneto]

There is a better way to disable system restore than that. Doing it your way will delete any system restore files the user has made. Although a huge memory hog, system restore is quite a usefull tool. My suggestion is to first create a restore point. Then download the ZD winbench found here:

<A HREF="http://www.zdnet.com/etestinglabs/stories/benchmarks/0,8829,2387760,00.html" target="_new">http://www.zdnet.com/etestinglabs/stories/benchmarks/0,8829,2387760,00.html</A>

The benchmarking software is ok but it comes with a usefull utility called the startup manager. From here you can manage all you programs that start upon boot. Now you can also do this within windows, but system restore has a nasty habit of turning itself back on when disabled that way.
Within the startup manager disable the following programs.
1) pc health
2) *state manager
3) scan registery
4) Task monitor
5) wcmdmgr

This should help free up some of your resources and allow you to keep the restore point you created.

I agree with the virtual memory setup in part, the minimum and maximum should be the same value. However I am not sure I agree with your amounts I would possibly go a bit higher. Better yet is to have a partition on your hard drive of aprrox 256-512 meg just for virtual memory ( swap file). Better even still is a partition of the same size on another drive on another ide channel. The faster the drive the better. Having it on another ide channel allows for simultaneous access and this is the best option.



A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[funkdog]

I think I came up with a better idea. I bought another stick of 128 Muskin ram. Best I could think of.