set amount of ram windows can use

[nabeels786]

im on windows xp, and tweaked with some settings, and i notice that out of the 256 odd mb of ram i have, by the time i book up, ive got about 40mb left...is there a way to set the max windows can use?

http://users.cloud9.net/~khalid/images/memusage.gif

[Rick Bull]

Wouldn't that defeat the point of having all that RAM? Maybe it's just a dodgy program that has a memory leak. I find things like KaZaA (lite) hog up my PC's resources.

[nabeels786]

well the amount of ram windows can use, not other programs

this is right after startup btw

[JungleMan]

If you want Windows to start using the swap file and have your other programs use the RAM that's going to severely slow stuff down.

Either get more RAM ;) or leave as-is. I'm now becoming more aware that 512MB is de-facto these days and I'm glad I have 512...

[Rick Bull]

If it's right when Windows starts up why don't you run msconfig and disable everything in the start-up section and see if it helps. If it does slowly re-enable one thing at a time until you get the problem back again, then you'll know if the problem is a dodgy program.

[nabeels786]

alright thanks.
yeah i think i should get some more ram..

[Rick Bull]

Personally I don't see the big deal about RAM, it never seems to make that much difference, unless maybe you have loads of windows or memory hogging apps open at once.

[siyan]

Windows itself shoulnd't take up more than 80-90 MB of RAM. Programs hog the rest.

Its acutally better to have windows run totally in RAM and let the programs fight over the remaining RAM and slodge in the swap

-C

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

You may want to see what apps at taking memory. Probably stuff you load on start-up.

This is a common problem, people tottally waste their RAM on start-up apps, that, in most cases, they rarely use.

[Pc_Madness]

Originally posted by siyan
Windows itself shoulnd't take up more than 80-90 MB of RAM. Programs hog the rest.

Its acutally better to have windows run totally in RAM and let the programs fight over the remaining RAM and slodge in the swap

-C

But this is XP, it hogs all of the resources.

How bid is XP itself?? well over 1gb.. so there would have to use a fair bit of memory..

[Rick Bull]

But a lot of that 1GB is just apps like CD-Player etc isn't it? The actually XP operating system (i.e. the stuff that gets loaded to memory) wouldn't take that much would it? But yeah when I tried XP on my old PC it seemed pretty slow, so I assume it probably does take up more memory.

[JoshT]

I've gotten XP Pro to use less than 60 MB of RAM by tweaking it. Mainly disabling any Windows networking/file sharing components and as many services as possible.

[siyan]

Originally posted by Pc_Madness
But this is XP, it hogs all of the resources.

How bid is XP itself?? well over 1gb.. so there would have to use a fair bit of memory..

I am using XP. It takes marginally more RAM than 2k, a clean install takes 62 MB and with some tweaks you can get it to about 55.

Just because it takes 1GB HD space doesn't neccesarily mean it takes a boatload of ram. a 700MB DivX rip won't eat up any more than the 8MB or so for WMP6.4

-C

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

Xp blows. Get 2k.

[Pc_Madness]

I was thinking of making a second partition for Win 98se, as sometimes XP can just be abit to much..

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

I run win2k, I load the system core to memory and it only takes about 80 MB of ram.