OT: Good place to ask about XP memory problems

[Clive George]

Wondering why my computer tells me there's 1G physical memory "available" when it's spending huge amounts of time swapping. Any places to ask?

[Bob Eager]

LOL! harry gets it wrong again...

[Andrew Gabriel]

Have you got a video card which shares main memory (or rather, steals a chunk of main memory for its own use)?

[Clive George]

Laptop, so yes.

[hugh]

Had similar problem with my desktop - solution, up the memory to 2gb. That's on a PC which originally (about 5 years ago) ran OK on 512mb

[The Natural Philosopher]

no need to ask. Its windows, innit?

[Adrian C]

/me peers into a crystal ball...

Ah, Laptop - so may possibly bought from a retailer that's bundled in a shed of now useless tools? Things like Norton or McAfee or Update beacons sitting there guzzling 100KBs of memory and doing nought. Also might have hanging, leaky or crashed zombie applications that could require a fix or an update.

Identify the things-that-should-be-shot with 'Process Explorer', which is is a detailed take on Task Manager but reveals much more.

stay on top of updates to Windows and everything else. I find auto managing that with Secunia very helpful. Some kind fellow recommended that useful software here, I'll pass the recommendation on :-)

[Adrian C]

disable the pesky things that live in your task bar (freeing up memory) and then let Secunia go for them all instead.

[dennis]

? I have two laptops neither shares video memory.

[Adrian C]

What colour are they?

[Clive George]

memory, it's windows swapping out when it doesn't need to.

[Clive George]

Yeah, I've got 3Gb. The problem is it's reporting 1G as available rather than using the darned stuff...

[Chris Bartram]

> Work laptop, so none of that crap. It's not mysterious processes using

"they all do that, sir"

[Roger Mills]

Are you sure that what it is reporting as 'available' doesn't include the swap file - rather than all being physical memory?

[Clive George]

Reasonably sure, yes - it's all in the "Physical Memory" box.

[Mike Humphrey]

That's a "feature" of XP (actually it goes all the way back to Windows NT 3.1). Each process can only use 2G of RAM. It's possible to use more in total - another process can take the rest - but that doesn't help if one program is short of RAM. Also it can only access 4G of address space in total - RAM and all the add-on cards, the video card often taking a big chunk - so some RAM may go unused. There are options to raise these limits (3G mode and PAE), but IIRC service pack 3 permenantly locks out these options - too many bad drivers were crashing with them enabled. The only way round it is a newer version of Windows, or 64-bit XP (though 64 bit XP has no drivers for most hardware).

Mike

[Bob Eager]

It's the 'free' figure you need to look at - at least, on Win 7. Don't have an XP box to check.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I had that. deleted my enormous browsing history..problem solved :-)

[Clive George]

It's not one process running out of memory, it's the combination of several. So I'm ok with the 2G limit on each process. It does sometimes go under 1G, but it then pages out again.

[Jethro]

I vaguely recall no matter how much memory you give XP, it insists on a swap file. No idea why.