You are running the bare minimum of RAM for Windows XP. RAM is really cheap. Clint is right. Another 256 MB should bring noticeable improvement.
You may have gotten to a point where the size of your saved messages in OE has gotten very large and this why you are just seeing this error message now. If we are comparing specs, right now I'm running a commit charge of 389 MB / 1695 MB. I have 60 processes running. Of course I have 1 GB of RAM and I'm about to add another 1 GB because I've been finding Photoshop is sucking up everything available. The thing that will slow down a computer faster than anything else is not enough memory. Ben Moore -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Support-OrpheusComputing.com Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2005 4:05 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: PCWorks: WinXP out of memory condition Maybe you need to defrag with "Diskeeper" and run chkdsk if you never had problems before. "Commit charge" should be only a number, 3 digits long with an "M" behind it, like "172M". The whole line should be something like "172M/1247M" where the 1st # is PageFile usage and the 2nd # is PageFile available. These numbers are going to be different of course depending on how you, or XP has the PageFile/swapfile set. If you only have 256mb of RAM, and your commit charge is 272M, that's not good. This means you're running off of your HARD DRIVE for memory, which is MUCH slower than RAM. When you run out of physical RAM, then the OS has to use the virtual memory area in the PageFile which really slows things down. I'm not sure though what you mean by "272,388" as that figure. Is that number after the comma, the number that's after the / slash mark? I think you're reading those figures wrong since of course you can't have more memory FREE UP after starting more programs. Look at the "Performance" tab when you cont-alt-del for more details. Ideally, (or maybe not so ideally), XP sets the PF usage by default for 1.5x the amount of RAM for a minimum size, and either 2x or 3x the amount of RAM for max size (can't recall which and it's not shown in mine). So in my case with 512mb of RAM, my PF is about ~768mb min and I THINK the max is about 1536mb or so, which would be 3x. I never saw any change in performance in my case when changing the PF to a fixed size, or making it a bit smaller or larger for both min and max numbers. So, I let XP "manage" it. Regardless of how much RAM you have, and how few programs you have open, there is ALWAYS going to be PF usage. The key is keeping it to a MINIMUM, and when it gets higher than your amount of RAM (which if what you told me is correct in your case), that's not good. My commit charge has never even gotten above ~350mb with about 35 IE windows open, plus several apps. Mine only goes to about 200M in normal use. Like right now, mine is only 206M and I have OE open, this email, a folder open, 3 webpages, Metapad, Sygate Firewall, AV software, "TeaTimer" (part of SpyBot), "Autosizer", Logitech's Mouseware, and a calculator. It couldn't hurt if you went to 512mb of RAM, that would certainly help. -Clint God Bless Clint Hamilton, Owner http://OrpheusComputing.com ) http://ComputersCustomBuilt.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vern" Clint, > TWELVE icons in the System Tray?? Wow Vern. I hope you have > a > fast CPU and a lot of RAM. :-) There has to be more than 5 > things running if you have 12 icons in the tray. I would > guess > there's about 35 running. Right now I only have 10 icons in the system tray. I have 37 in the "processes" and I have 45504 of physical memory available. I only have a 1.4 gig and 256 meg of ram. I've had this computer over 3 years and never had this problem before and usually run with up to 15 icons in system tray. > Then look at "Commit charge" and see what that says. Commit charge is around 272,388. What is commit charge anyway? When I started OE tonight it gave me the same out of message error but then it went away and all is working normal now. Normal relatively speaking. It takes 5 minutes from the time I turn the computer on before I see the icons on the desk top. All programs load slowly. When I turned the computer on I had 45452 physical memory free. After I started the ISP program to get on the internet it went up to 61532. It went up after I started another program. Duh? ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
