Win95 is utilizing 65 of my 196megs of RAM, What's wrong???

[ThomasT]

Hello,
I just installed a 128meg DIMMS on my computer this weekend but windows95 is indicating that it's utilizing only 35% (~65meg) of it. How can this be fixed (if it's even a problem???)? Does this mean that my programs only have that 65megs of physcial RAM to work with besides the swaps?

any suggestions or asnwers?

Thanks,
Tom T

[kwai]

35% is good! 35% is what windows is using as overhead. that means the rest of your memory is free for other apps to use.

[ThomasT]

Thanks for the reply. I wasn't sure if this was good or bad. I do have another question concerning this matter. Before the 128 extra megs of RAM, windows was using only about 29% of the RAM. That's ~19megs (I had 65meg before). It's now using ~35% of 195megs (~65meg). Why is it utilizing so much more of my RAM?

Thanks,
Tom T

[bighammer]

infamous MS

[Eli]

Could you have to take the size of the swap file into account? Just a thought.

[oldbe]

ctrl-alt-dlt just to see what else is running in the background? You can always "cancel" out of that or cancel everything but 'Explore' and 'Systray'.

[kwai]

as hammer said, ms is greedy.

swap file is different -- it uses hd space to cache what your memory won't hold.

if you feel you must (will it really make a difference outside of gaming?) you can specify how much memory windows can use in your system.ini file. towards the end of the file there should be a header called [vcache]. if its not there you can add it in. then you have to set min and max settings. the final entry should look like this:

[vcache]
minfilecache=x
maxfilecache=x

where x is the amount of memory in bytes (1mb = 1024 bytes. people suggest you set the max at 1/4 the amount of physical memory. i'm not sure what you should set the min to. in this case, your entry would be something like:

[vcache]
minfilecache=10240
maxfilecache=32768

(32mb = 32768bytes)

if you've never messed around with systems files before, i would strongly suggest you back everything up, or not even try at all. the only reason i mess with my settings is cuz i only got 64mb of ram and the games i play will take all of that if they could.

oh yeah, and you can't sue someone for trying to help you. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[Aris]

I thought Win's memory cache was a percentage of your memory size, so it would increase if you installed mo' memory.

[kwai]

so it would seem from tomt's experience, but this setting lets you manually set the amounts, just like the managing virtual memory setting.

[kwai]

i stand corrected. it seems most people recommend setting the min cache size to the same as the max, and the upper limit of max cache at 16 mb. so a typical entry should look like:

[vcache]
minfilecache=16384
maxfilecache=16384

this seems to be the setting that helped cure some people with cd burning problems.