Something is hogging memory...

C

Clean_Rich

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and I can't seem to figure out what it is. The computer in question has 256 meg of ram and is running XP home edition. When I go to System Info, it lists Total physical memory at 256 meg and available as like 20 or 30 meg. I went into msconfig/startup and unchecked some items, but no change occurred so I unchecked evrything in there and still no change in available memory. I also went into task manager and looked around in there, nothing out of the ordinary that I could find that would account for such a memory drain. Is there something I'm missing as far as places to look? thanks.
 
What anti-virus are you running? Open task manager and see what programs are using alot of memory. Right click on an empty space on task bar and clcik on task manager
 
I 've got 512 and and 317 available, so I guess I'm using about 195. That's pretty close to your numbers.
 
Originally posted by roban
Open task manager and see what programs are using alot of memory. Right click on an empty space on task bar and clcik on task manager

roban, I'm sure your reply is appreciated, but if you had read the entire post, you'd have seen that Clean_Rich has already looked through the task manager.

Clean_Rich, are you sure that nothing unusual is showing up in your running processes? Be sure and order the processes by Mem Usage to see what is using the most RAM. How many total processes are running, and are you looking at available memory when all apps are closed? I'm assuming you have restarted already... if not I would definitely do that and then check your task manager immediately after Windows finishes loading. Let us know what you find out.
 
I'm thinking 20 to 30 meg available out of 256 meg is pretty slim. The numbers you guys posted sound a lot more normal to me. Math isn't my greatest subject but it seems that roughly 2 thirds of your RAM is available. On the computer in question here, the percentage is much lower. The computer has been rebooted many times because of the fiddling around in msconfig. The reason this whole thing started is because of an error message when trying to access an online game site which complained about not enough memory to open the game. It was probably not an overly memory intensive game either, like scrabble or something, (it's actually my brother's computer). We uninstalled Kazaa and ran Spybot which found some crap on his computer of course, such as Newdot, ect. He was still unable to get on the site because of being too low on memory. He defragged his hdd and was then able to get on the game but his memory is still at the same place. I'm just baffled as to where else to look for something hogging the memory.
 
Originally posted by muzikool
roban, I'm sure your reply is appreciated, but if you had read the entire post, you'd have seen that Clean_Rich has already looked through the task manager.

Clean_Rich, are you sure that nothing unusual is showing up in your running processes? Be sure and order the processes by Mem Usage to see what is using the most RAM. How many total processes are running, and are you looking at available memory when all apps are closed? I'm assuming you have restarted already... if not I would definitely do that and then check your task manager immediately after Windows finishes loading. Let us know what you find out.

Hey muzikool. Yeah, I compared his processes to the ones in my task manager and nothing looks out of the ordinary and there were about the same amount of processes running as in mine. I have 512 ddr and right now mine has 331 available. His is about the same as I mentioned earlier, 20-30 meg available out of 256.
Pretty weird. Maybe tomorrow I'll have him look in the Startup folder to see if there's stuff in there, but other than that, I'm stumped.
 
press ALT+CTRL+DELE and see processes tab...also disable some services.it's normal to have 20MB free.or if you want you can disable some windows visual effects
 
Clean_Rich, do you know if the computer has the 811493 update installed? It will show up in Add/Remove as Windows XP Hotfix Q811493. You might already know about it, but if not, you can read about it here.
If the machine has this update installed, you might want to follow the advice given in that thread. I'm not sure whether that's the problem, but it's worth a shot!
 
Math isn't my greatest subject but it seems that roughly 2 thirds of your RAM is available. On the computer in question here, the percentage is much lower.
Should they make a difference? It seems that Windows uses what it needs regardless of installed memory. If you want more memory available shouldn't you install more?
 
I'm getting 343 used out of 512 with msn, mail, IE, ventrilo, office toolbar loaded, and a mess ofother little guys loaded.

Is your memory usage the same right after you boot as it is after you've been using the system for a couple hours?

If it starts out ok and then memory fills up without showing up in taskmanager you have a program with a memory leak (it claims memory then doesn't release it when finished).

There is no fix for this except not using the offending program. You could try one of the memory manager programs that claim to clean up after bad programs but I haven't used one so can't make a recommendation.

The other thing is a lot of programs "preload" at boot and won't always show up in the start menu. You need one of the "tweak" programs to remove them. Someone else may have a way to get rid of them using just windows.
 
Thanks for the replies. I'll check out some of these things with my brother and get back to you on how it went. :)

P.S. He is on a Dell computer. I have always built my own computers so I don't know if these company's like Dell, and HP, ect., hide their proprietary stuff somewhere I'm not looking. Also, I'm teching his computer over the phone which is never as easy as being there.
 
I would agree with muzikool and JSylvia007 on the hotfix issue. I was getting sluggish peformance and the last thing I thought of was a bad hotfix critical update that M$ sent out in May. We'll after I pulled all my hair out trying to find any hidden viruses or programs that were causing the memory leak resulting in sluggish performance I installed the hot fix replacement. It did the trick for me.!!!
 

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