hey there IT people

I've recently had some issues regarding to performance of my system, most of wich i was able to fix with a format, a defrag and some parameter cleaning. however I have question about memory paramaters, I hope any of you can give me a hand with this :p here it is:



when left on idle ( the desktop open with no applications running, not even notable background like xfire, msn or whatnot ) my cpu's and network ( as seen in windows taskmanager ) showed little to no activity, sometimes a spike on the cpu of a few percent but nothing spectacular, but what worries me a little is the memory usage.
In this idle state memory consumption is approximatly 1.35 - 1.50gb! I checked around google a bit for what should be normal for my OS, and most say it should be around 500-800mb range or something.

also some other memory paramaters as of right now:

Fysical memory (MB)
Total: 3065
Cached: 2025
available:0

kernelmemory (MB)
total : 169
paged : 86
nonpaged: 83

it worries me a little that some of these numbers are quite low, like the fact there is 0 fysical memory available, or that it says I have a total of 3065mb memory even though the system tells me its 4gb? unfortunatly I don't have much knowledge of pc's so if someone could help me, would be much appreciated



my machine is as following:

model - Acer Aspire 7738G
OS - Windows Vista Home Premium
GPU - Nvidia Geforce GT130M 2303MB
CPU - Intel Core2 Quad Processor Q9000 ( 2.0GHZ, 1066 MHz FSB)
memory - 4GB DDR3

if there's any more info you'd need drop a post and i'll check it out thanks in advance

Windows 32-bit, will always see 3.5GB even though you have 4GB. Windows uses that "missing" chunk for itself, that hog!

Either case the fact you are missing 500MB, caching 2GB, and none available is odd indeed.

My system shows of 4GB, Total: 3509, Cached: 1312, Avail:1374 and I have Outlook, Photoshop, and 6 IE windows open, plus things running in the background.

What is your memory configuration? 2 x 2gb, 1 x 4gb, 4 x 1gb.... Could be one stick or part of a stick is bad. How long have you had that memory?

Since you reformated it, I can't see it being a software issue. What happens when you run it in Safe Mode (power on, while constantly hitting the F8 key until menu shows, select safe mode).

yes its a 32 bit system indeed. perhaps I should consider upgrading to windows 7 64bit, if it can run it that is :p.


I am now running several light applications ( a download @ 1,5mb/s and a browser with 3 tabs open that don't use excesive flash or anything ) and data has changed lightly. overal memory consumption is more stable at 1,5 - 1,6 gb of usage. also the physical available memory is now often a number between 0 and 50, often 0 but it does do something at times )

also ive been doing more research and I found this:

"Vista fills available RAM with cached data that you may use, this is called SuperFetch. Even when you go up to 2GB of RAM the Free memory is likely to be really low"

Perhaps this is the reason why the data are so low, and the cached memory is actualy available or something, perhaps it can be turned off to allow for more performance or something.

also about available memory.. it's strange indeed. the sticker on the laptop swears it has 4.0gb DDR3 memory, but programs like System Requirements Lab tell me I have 3.0gb. perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it is only 32bit?

as far as I know its a single 4gb. might have to look it up in specifications but there's nothing saying its several devices.

Also on the fact that my idle memory usage is 1,35gb to 1,5gb is maybe explainable.. I checked source control and about 400mb is being consumed by anti-virus, and a lot of programs are running in the 10-80mb range.

so the remaining issues are the low available ( wich might be caused by superfetch )
and the missing 500mb

you know, i've done a check, and I think it's indeed superfetch, when I booted up I had a massive 1500mb of available memory, wich slowly gets drawn completly into cache. this probably explains the low memory situation. just the low total memory but that is not as important as being on the constant verge of a memory dump :p

Hmm, I think 32 bit in the binary system means the computer will only use 3GB of RAM no matter how much you have I think, not sure.

vista does take a lot of memory for it's self that is why i changed to 7