why is more ram being used now....

[benchristian]

ok...i used to have 32 megs SDRAM and when i started windows it used to have like 20 megs ram left over after it's done starting up...

i added a 128 meg chip (for a total of 160) and now i have 96 megs ram unused after startup...if it needs so much ram then how did i run it at all on the 32 meg chip??

edit-i think i figured this out...it might have drastically reduced the swap file size...please reply and tell me if i'm right.

[This message has been edited by benchristian (edited 01-12-2001).]

[By-tor & the Snow Dog]

Well, doze is going to use what it has.

think about it, if you have one room, you're going to store all your "****" in that room. Now, if you get a bigger house with say, 4 rooms, you can spread out your "****" and STILL have more room to move around.

That's one reason your machine will run better on more ram, it can load more data into the extra ram, which it can access MUCH mor quickly than it can the data in the swap file.

Does that make any sense, or have I brought you down to my level?

By-Tor

[Biff]

Of course in the new house the lobby would be wider so you and your 3 brothers could move the **** into the 4 rooms at the same time.

Sorry - I just had to say that http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[BFlurie]

Your extra memory gets used by the "vcache" -- virtual disk cache. You can monitor it w/Sysmon.exe by adding the item under Memory Manager -- Disk Cache.

[Techie Dude]

My system has 650mb of ram.

After I finish booting, usually 500 or close to, is free. 150mb to boot and run a few small progs on start up!

Basically, if you have ram to spare, windows will use it. I haven`t seen my system drop below 400mb free for a while (except for playing a game ot two). I got it to drop to 20mb free when I copied 4gb of data to another drive, but usually, it`s got plenty free. Actually, it was good to see that my ram could actually go that low. I wasn`t convinced that my ram was working, but that proved it. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

If I`m running some intensive apps, or graphics apps, it will use whatever ram if free, but I don`t really take much notice anymore.

I run RamPage to manage memory, well, used to! I used to free ram every now and then, but with 650mb, i never had to use it, so now I don`t.

Also, my swap file hasn`t been hit in months!

TD.

[This message has been edited by Techie Dude (edited 01-13-2001).]

[AndreRIO]

Techie Dude, is it ok to shut down swap memory if you have that much more memory? will windows run better, faster? lets say...if i have 512mb of ram, can i run turn off the swap memory? http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[otheos]

No, keep swap file! if you got a lot of RAM it will use it instead.

Techie dude, what do you use your pc for? with 768MB (or even 1G) and photoshop brings the swap file up to 340MB (that's a total of 1.1G) after it suck up all RAM.

Don't worry too much about how much memory is free. With 160MB you'll run out if you use anything large (sound/image/video editing) anyway! So optimise your system with the memory it's got, and if you find yourself having always free memory sitting there just increase the disk cacheing (ala Unix). This will give you a real performance increase (with 768MB I ran a cache of 200MB)