Memory being sucked up by pc....

[Sweeper]

Pentium 450III \@558
Abit BE-6
64 megs PC100 Sdram
Quantom Bigfoot 4.3
1 partition 2 sections
Windows 98 sec. edition
Soundblaster Live
Banshee 16 meg AGP video card
120 floppy superdisk
cd-rewriter with software loaded
dvd player
3 1/2 floppy
Out of 64 megs of ram showing only 7 megs left ?? That's at idle?
any clues???
friends pc / trying to get it up and going.

[jeana]

Try pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL once: Do you see a lot of programs listed under "Close Program"? If you don't need them all, you might try Start->Run->msconfig and uncheck a few to prevent them all from loading at startup.

Win98SE and all the software that comes with devices like CDRW and DVD do seem to suck up a lot of RAM: I have many of the same components as your friend, but still feel the pinch with 128MB. I solved this by turning off many of the flashy startup programs, and running them only when I need them. The software that came with SoundBlaster Live I found especially obnoxious.

There are also a lot of memory-freeing programs available as shareware or freeware:
FreeMem is the first one that springs to my mind but there are others. I think if you do a search in the Sysopt forums and also at download sites like winfiles.com you'll be able to find these programs.

[Chaostician]

Try these steps to conserve mem in win9X:

1) Click "start" and go to "Run" and type MSCONFIG. Hit "enter"; when the box comes up go the last tab which is "startup" and disable everything that you don't use on a constant basis...i.e. - I only have Rain, Mobo Monitor, BlackIce and Volume Ctrl. Leave Systray and ScanRegistry in there.

2) Right click on "My computer" and choose "properties". Go to "performance" and then click "virtual Memory". Choose to sepecify virtual memory and set max/min to app. 2.5 times the amount of memory in your system. Click ok. Win9X is terrible at "loosing" track of virtual memory.

3) Same "my computer", "properties" tab. Click on "File System" and change type to "network server". This allocates more cache to CPU usage.

4) This involves "editing" your system.ini file. Click "start" go to "run" and type "system.ini" and hit ok/enter. A note pad comes up; in the notepad 3/4 the way down you'll have an [vcache] with nothing under it, make it look like this:
[vcache]
minfilesize=16384
maxfilesize=16384

Save the entry and exit, reboot and hopefully that fixes some of your problems. Windows will "try" and use all available ram to run itself if you leave it idle.

If you have prob's please reply...

Chaostician
"A quizical Science that even I don't understand"

Umm and thanks jeana, I missed you stating the MSConfig thing...

[This message has been edited by Chaostician (edited 01-08-2000).]

[BBA]

All that sounds like good advice but since you have a SB-Live, check how much memory you have reserved for SoundFont, it's an app under the Audio HQ app. I would set it limit close to the size of the soundfont bank you have loaded, as it takes system memory away to make it's reserved space.

[Sweeper]

Thanks, will give it all a try and let you know.