something;s munching on my RAM

[rudeboymcc]

hi. i don't know what happenned, but recently i've noticed very slow boots and generaly using the pc is very slow.

i have iwn xp, athlon 800, 384mb RAM.

i'm talking form a normal boot, i can't run adobe photoshop becuase there's not enough ram. in control panel>system, the system detects all 384mb of Ram. it's only sdram but i know it wasn't like this before.

does anyone know of any reason this would happen?

[bilu]

Have you checked for processes eating your memory or CPU? And have you checked for spyware?

Search Google for Spybot, it's very good.


Bilu

[rudeboymcc]

thanks but i've sorted it out. i rememebered doing some tests where i turned off virtual memory to see what would happen. i left it at 0mb.

btw, i set it at 512mb, as i seem to remember someone reccommend it. i've set this as both minimum and maximum. what's teh recommended size on a system with 384mb sdram?

[iliasstr]

Well, it is said that you should set the amount of your system's RAM in minimum and double its size in maximum field.

[tiki4]

Well,

that may be sufficient or it may not. Especially Photoshop is a real memory eater as it caches all files in it's own disk cache, circumventing the Windows cache. I think the size of the RAM as minimum is O.K., but I'd give it a little bit more space upward if you can afford it. Windows tries to enlarge the pagefile in any case if it finds there is not enough memory left for a starting program. That is a timy operation unfortunately. I think you should test with Photoshop and see how memory usage goes up, then decide for yourself how large a pagefile you need.

tiki4

[rudeboymcc]

well i set it to 300 mb min and max and it turns out your right. as sooon as i opened photoshop it took all the pagefile + an extra 50 mb which windows took as tiki4 said it would. i'll try setting it to 384x2=468. thanks guys.

[rudeboymcc]

ha, just some back from school, show how much they teach me there. i meant 768 .

[rudeboymcc]

well on trying to change it seems there's a problem. i keep getting a blue screen. under technical info it says classpnp.sys. i've tried chkdsk /f and it was all ok. i checked for viruses, none, i tried it with the virus program shut down. anyone know what else will work?

i'm using win xp, when i go to the advanced tab in system, and am in the virtual memory tab, i can set the desired size, but when i press ok it crashes.


btw, will it be faster if i get an old 5400 rpm harddrive and use that for the page file only?? it's only 1.6gig.

[killingspree]

just a guess: might it be possible that your hard drive doesn't contain enough free disk space? this might lead to the crashes!

regards
steVe

[rudeboymcc]

hard drive is 60 gig and only 20gig full. very recently defragmented, and i've even tried changing it to secondary master to primary slave. i've tried changing the cable to another 80 pin one and a 40 pin one. there's nothing else htat microsofts techincal help says to do apart from chdsk whcih as i mentioned before i've already done.

it must have been a setting i've changed because i am the one who set it to 300 in the first place. it was on 574 before and i had never changed it. someone told me thats too much so i set it down. is there any way to do it through the registry? maybe that would work? or even another tweaking program that could do it for me?