Memory Usage

[TonyMan]

Trying to understand some things about memory usage. We had old laptops at work with 48 meg that only had about 2 meg of usable physical memory after booting per system monitor. They were replaced by Compaq Armada M700 with 120 meg. On a clean boot there is only about 14 meg of physical memory left. I've cleaned out a lot of stuff via msconfig, but it makes very little difference.

Is there any kind of guidline as to how much memory Windows actually uses, or a better place to examine it at? My concern is that things seem to be slowing down (I figure swapping to disk) and The folks at the help desk don't like to really deal with issues like this.

Thanks

[BFlurie]

Which OS? I forget how NT/2K monitors this (I'm sure it can), but for W9X, if you run Sysmon.exe (may need to install it from the CD), you can set up to monitor:
Disk Cache
Swapfile in use
Free (or unused) memory
The disk cache may be using alot a mem. But this is by design. If Winders needs more mem, it'll instantly reduce the disk cache (to a certain point) to free up mem to accomodate whatever is needing it. The swapfile in use will come into play when Winders can't supply enough mem for your apps.

[neo_otyugh]

the way i ahve run win98 in the past it usually uses 58-65 megs of physical memory upon bootup and win NT/2000 seems to use 110-115 megs of physical memory upon boot. that is with just OD running and no other programs...

[TonyMan]

It's WIN98SE. Based upon these answers I'm probably not as bad off as I thought, dependent upon what the company folks have configured to load. I compared to my home PC, which doesn't load much. I've got 160meg & show about 96meg free upon a clean boot, so that is 64 in use. I'll have to double check what is really needed at boot up.

Thanks