Low memory on Aspire 5920

Is anyone else having trouble with low memory errors on an Aspire 5920 running Windows Vista Home Premium? Mine has 2Gb of RAM but has come up with these errors when only running a relatively small number of applications - Messenger, iTunes and the BBC's iPlayer.

I've tried increasing the virtual memory size to min 4096Mb, max 6144Mb so I'm hoping the problem will go away but it would be useful to know whether this is some kind of known fault or if it is just that Vista is so demanding! I had been running a similar or greater load quite happily under XP Pro on another laptop with only 512Mb RAM.

If the problem persists, is it worth me adding more physical RAM and/or trying a further increase in virtual memory?

I'd be grateful for any advice - thanks.

 

Vista is a memory hogg, it's eats up what ever you have.

 

I don't understand all this stuff about 32-bit operating systems vs. 64-bit, but do know that 32-bit Windows OS'es can't handle 4GB of RAM. At best it'll run but without utilizing all the RAM, at worst the PC will actually run slower or crash.
MaximumPC's latest Dream Machine runs on 2GB of RAM. They wanted to put more in but noted the problems with 4GB.
Have you brought up Task Manager while running these applications? I don't know if there are better programs for monitoring system resources but TM might help you get a handle on the situation. Start one app and watch memory usage, start the second one and monitor, start the third one...

 

Thanks Acorn and Telkwa. I will try and monitor memory usage but I'd be interested to know if anyone else is suffering from low memory on Vista and if anyone is using more than 2Gb of RAM?

One further thought - the laptop is also running Norton Internet Security 2008 whereas the older one was running F-Secure. I've heard of resource problems with Norton in the past does anyone know if it uses a lot more memory than F-Secure?

Can anyone else running Vista with 2Gb of RAM say what their virtual memory setting are and whether they are getting low memory errors? It would be very helpful to have some comparisons.

 

Looks like memory leak problem.Try to monitor application ram usage. You can use task manager for it.BTW have you update your system with vista patches ?

 

Norton uses the most memory. I would suggest you get a lighter, more efficient antivirus solution such as Avast, Avira, AVG, etc. They use a lot less resources compared to Norton. I'm not sure about F-Secure though, but the other antivirus programs I mentioned are good and I'm sure other members here would recommend them over Norton.

 

Thanks - I'd suspected a memory leak and will investigate. On the patches, I have been to the Microsoft Windows update page and asked for any updates, I also have security updates turned on, but is there somewhere else that I should be requesting Vista patches from?

I'd still find it helpful to know what virtual memory settings others have their systems set to?

 

perhaps you should locate the current beta or RC of Vista's SP1 and try that on for size and see if it fixes your memory leak problem.

how many processes and services do you have running?

you might also like to go get HijackThis and research all the files it's running (well, just the one's you don't recognize) to see how legit they are and if you really need them.

I know on boot up, Vista is eating up close to 860MB of RAM...I'm slowly killing of processes and services that came with this (like Acer's eCrap) and it's freeing up more memory! very nice

 

Thanks very much for the suggestions - I'll now need to wait a bit before I can investigate further as its actually my daughter's laptop and it is not here at the moment. when I get a chance then I'll try the things you suggest.

One thing I had noticed is that on loading, before running any normanl applications (apart from Norton, etc) it was already using just over 900Mb RAM.

Also, since increasing virtual memory to initial 4096MB and max 6144MB the problem has not occurred again so I'm hoping that may have helped. However, I'm not convinced it has been tested properly yet.

 

I find that interesting that you can create a virtual memory size of 6GB being 32bit Vista can only address a maximum of 4GB (that's RAM + all the internal memory included for integrated devices), so with your 2GB and the 4GB page file, that's telling me you have 2GB more then it should be able to use...let alone boosting it to 6GB!!!

while it's a bit of a threadjacking, perhaps someone here could explain this disparity...

 

Hi Rob500

I am also having this problem with a new Acer 5920, bought for my daughter. She has problems whilst accessing internet (myspace and MSN). Its a real pain. I have done the obvious checks, removal of Temp files, virtual memory settings etc but to no avail.

was going to have a look at statups but as I am not use to the startup requirements of the Acer am a little hesitant.

Will let you know how I get on. Here is a link to another site I have asked questions on http://forums.pcw.co.uk/thread.jspa?threadID=127138&tstart=0

Col

 

Hi Col,

Well in some ways it is good to know that the problem is not unique to my daughter's laptop! Your problem does sound very similar. I am a little handicapped because the computer is not here all the time but will try some more things when I get a chance. If I get anywhere then I'll let you know as well.

In case it is relevant, are you also running Norton Intenet Security 2008 as I'm slightly suspicious that may not be helping?

I think I'll also try asking on the Microsoft forums - I'll let you know if I get any results from that.

 

Here's link to all MS vista updates(Arranged by date)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/browse.aspx?DisplayLang=en&nr=20&productId=8D7DD8D7-1CA6-4632-BAEF-E7C0750ED02E&sortCriteria=date

 

Hi Rob, I also have that problem of not getting access to the laptop when need to, still get all the agro though when t goes wrong (if you know what I mean : )). Yep the laptop has Norton 2008 running on it. If I find out any more will post any results.

Cheers

Col

 

Thanks, I'll check them as soon as I can.

 

Hey Rob

I'm having bad memory issues with my Acer Aspire 5920. On boot up from a completely fresh installation, the number of processes running (listed in task manager) is nearly 80! The amount of free memory visible on the performance tab in the task manager (from a possible 2Gb physical RAM) starts at somewhere around 700Mb and it seaps away to just 20Mb within a minute or two. I've even seen it as low as 13Mb. 2Gb of RAM and only 13Mb free!

Nothing in the task manager shows it is using up more than 50Mb of memory. The biggest user of RAM is the Desktop Windows Manager (dwm.exe) which is currently using up just 30Mb.

I ran msconfig and disabled all startup programs, and then disabled all the services and rebooted the machine. This time around 40-50 processes were running on boot up and again 700Mb of memory was free - which then trickled down to 50 Mb within minutes once again.

It could be because of the graphics capability - my laptop has an integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator Driver for Mobile. The maximum memory it will use from the physical RAM is 358Mb and minimum 8Mb, so this should not be too much of a problem, should it? I heard Vista needs about 700Mb of RAM to run. So if it uses about 700-800Mb, and the graphics uses about 300Mb, that still leaves around a gigabyte (or just under) free, but evidently not.

I have seen another article on similar issues which advised trying some Windows Vista patches not available on Windows Update (see Four Must-Have Vista Updates). I'm going to give these a go and see if it fixes my "memory leak". I'll let you know how it goes...

I'm bitterly disappointed with Windows Vista (and the laptop) at the moment. The performance is absolutely dismal on this machine. I hope the patches provide a solution.

 

Hi Egghead

My daughters had similar problems. I ran widows defender and disabled startup programs that I didnt need (or thought I didnt need) got the physical memory down to around 43% but the free memory is in the range of around 30 to 80mb. Really dont know were to go from here, I will check out the patch as well.

Thanks for the note.

Col

 

Rob/Egghead

ran the 940105 fix and got the free memory to 680mb however it has now dropped to 40. thought it was too good to be true!!

Col

 

I installed three of the Vista updates:

• kb938194
• kb938979
• kb940105

Each time I checked what was happening with the Task Manager and no change. The memory still drains away to nothing. In one case it showed it was 0 Mb!

It seems the memory cache fills to 1200Mb or thereabouts, whilst the free memory drains away. When there is no more free memory the cacheing ceases, disk activity comes right down and the system stabilises. - And is still slow!

So I followed the Virtual memory settings Rob suggested in an earlier post

After applying these settings the system still loads the cacheing up to 1200MB ~ 1300MB and drains away the free memory to 50Mb or under, but the laptop actually works quite smoothly and runs Vista reasonably fast. My system currently reports its Page File at 1260M/6048M.

On the issue about Norton Internet Security (which I am not a fan) I found it made no difference with it installed, or on another fresh installation with Zone Alarm Pro installed instead. If you are worried about the Norton product being a resource hog, have a look at Norton 360 which has apparently reduced its footprint considerably.

Happy New Year.

 

mine drained away a few times to zero will try the Rob fix and see what happens.

Cheers

 

I'll be delighted if it works - I wish I could claim same clever technical knowledge for inventing it but it was just trial and (hopefully not) error. If it does work then does that mean I get a rep point ;-)

I've also had a couple of relevant replies on the Microsoft technical forums. They seem to think that it is almost certainly a rogue process and suggest Task Manager or Sysinternals Process Explorer to try and track it down. One other useful thing that was said is that somebody is sucessfully running iPlayer and Messenger all the time on Windows Vista with only 1GB of RAM - so with 2GB it must be possible! It is just a matter of tracking down what is using up all the RAM.

The full thread is at:

http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...1163&tid=e5cfe171-ca05-479b-aa9c-6993396015c1

 

I'm not sure how useful this is as an indicator - perhaps somebody else could advise - I thought Vista tended to try and use up as much RAM as possible as a sort of cache to reduce the time taken to load data. If that is true then it would mean that it is normal to appear to have very low amounts free? Can anyone explain more about this? Apologies if that is all rubbish!

 

I'm very interested in threads about the 5920. I have a brand new 5920, not the "G" model. Integrated Intel graphics.
If you tap Ctrl+Alt+Delete, go into Task Manager, then click the Performance tab, is that the one you're watching when you say the available memory slowly goes to zero?
The 5920 is running right now as I'm writing this on another PC. Physical Memory Usage vertical graph peaked at right about 1GB, and it's dropping now instead of going up. In other words, it's getting better not worse. At 918 MB now.
While I watch and wait, I should mention that I'm NOT using Norton. For security I'm using ZoneAlarm, AVG, Windows Defender, a2free, and Ad-Aware. All free, all well regarded programs.
Running for about ten minutes now.
Processes: 79, CPU usage: 1%, Physical Memory: 40%. The vertical graph showing 819MB. Still falling.
OK, it looks like Physical memory has leveled off at 38%, 776 MB. Holding steady there for the last few minutes.
If I go to "Processes" the 5 biggest memory hogs are:
svchost.exe 37,596K
dwm.exe 16,836K
avgrssv.exe 14,236K
Acer.Empowerment 13,712K
vsmon.exe 6,308K

avgrssv is part of AVG, vsmon is part of ZoneAlarm. Part of the price you pay for trying to keep Windows secure.
I've been thinking of turning off Acer Empowerment, and this is one more good reason to do so.
The two biggest are Windows processes and there's probly nothing I can do about that.

 

Hi Telkwa,

It is interesting that your 5920 has integrated graphics. Mine has the 8600M GS card. It might be useful to know what Col and Egghead have as anything that points to a pattern would be useful. Certainly the behaviour of yours sounds different to mine as far as I can remember - the trouble is that mine is not here at the moment as it is my daughter's. I need to arrange to go and do some more detailed investigations.

Out of interest, have you altered virtual memory settings or just left them at the default state of system managed?

 

Hi, Rob -
On the one hand, I've done major surgery on the new 5920. It's dual-booting Ubuntu 7.10. On the other hand, I've done very little tweaking in vista. Turned off a few services (Black Viper's website), turned off that stupid UAC feature, and not much else. Haven't touched the memory settings.

If you want to see how responsive the 5920 can be, install Linux.

I think the best way to compare models is to add the extra digits. Mine's a 5920-6470. That way people can google the exact model to see specs.

I thought yours had integrated graphics. If yours has a discrete card, that should mean less of the physical motherboard RAM would be sucked up by the graphics, shouldn't it? I'm pretty sure that some discrete cards can go to system RAM for help, but still, there's memory on that Nvidia card and that should give system RAM a break. At least that's what I've always thought.

Whenever I hear someone say it's their kid's computer I always think "spyware". It'd be interesting to hear what you see in that "Processes" tab. If it were me I'd be thinking about running HijackThis and getting some help in diagnosing the results.

Of course, with Linux your worries about spyware would virtually disappear. That's probably not a workable solution for you. I'm guessing your daughter would not embrace the challenge. But had to mention it

EDIT: Important to note that my results above were with no applications running at all. Well, you know what I mean, nothing like Word or Firefox or GIMP or etc.
That reminds me. Have noticed that running spyware scanners is a pretty good way to make the PC work hard for a few minutes. A coupla weeks ago I was running Ad-Aware and watching the Task Manager. Vista was recording hundreds of hard page faults per second. I don't know exactly what hard page faults are, but I know they're not desirable...

I'll try running a few programs this morning and see where the memory usage goes.

OK, that's weird...running "Deep Scan" in a2free. Getting some hard page faults, but physical memory usage is actually dropping. A little bit anyway, not like yesterday. Not what I expected. CPU usage (both cores) about 54%, physical memory usage hovering around 958 MB.

 

I attached a screenshot just for the fun of it. My 5920 running a2free scan. Notice the two CPU usage peaks. Those were when I started GIMP (twice because I goofed up the first time) to take a screenshot.
After taking this screenshot I started GIMP, Adobe Reader, Windows Media Center, OpenOffice, and Picasa. These programs were just sitting there, not doing any hard work, but wanted to see what would happen. Memory usage kept creeping upward but still held the line at about 73% once I stopped adding programs. The cooling fan was running continuously. As soon as all the extra programs were turned off, the fan dropped back to an inaudible level.

 

Hi Telkwa,

Thanks for the thoughts. I don't think it is spyware as I set the computer up for her only a few days ago and have always had Norton Internet Security 2008 running - unless something has got through that somehow. I'll look in more detail as soon as I get access to it again. It is very frustrating not having it here all the time.

The exact model is an aspire 5920G-302G25Hn LX.AN60X.041. See this link: http://www.acer.co.uk/public/page4....n&ctx3=-1&ctx4=United+Kingdom&crc=1345599010).

Like you say the graphics card can borrow from RAM but the only graphics thing she has been doing is the aeroglass interface - I wonder how much that uses?

I'm fairly sure hard page faults are simply cases where the bit of memory to be accessed has been transferred to virtual memory and needs to be brought back.

 

Rob -
You probly already know this. I kinda did but forgot it. When you're in Task Manager, looking at Processes, you can click directly on the little header over Memory Usage and get it to list by % usage instead of alphabetical.
A little more convenient to pick out the top abusers that way.

How's the firewall in Norton IS work? Does it monitor outgoing traffic like ZoneAlarm? I sure do like that feature.

 

Hi Rob, Telkwa and Egghead

Mine is the integrated graphics model 5920-3A2G16Mi.

Following the "Rob" fix the free physical memory wavers between 90mb and 150mb. Must admit I am really confused by the whole thing, however last night and this morning we have not had the error message following the fix. I thought I had messed up when I downloaded the hot fix as the free memory went down to zero.

Col

 

Thanks - yes I was using that and will do again as soon as I get access to the laptop. However, since increasing the virtual memory parameters my daughter has not reported any more low memory error messages so I'm hoping that it may have been at least a temporary solution. I'd still like to understand why it was happening though.

You are correct, Norton's firewall monitors outgoing traffic and seems fairly good as far as I can see. On my own laptop I'm using F-Secure which also does the same.

 

That's the machine I have. I'd love to know if I can upgrade it with one of the new Nvidea graphics cards. Probably not?

I'm still getting the free memory running down to near nothing but the sluggishness has been solved a little.

 

Have any of you with the low memory problems been able to identify which task(s) are using up all the RAM?

 

no but am thinking of taking it to work next week and asking one of our PC tech team to have a look for me, if able to do this will post outcome.

 

Rob, what are the ten worst memory hogs in "Processes"? I don't think this has anything to do with hardware. It shouldn't be too hard to identify the worst offenders.

And you guys know that cranking up virtual memory is a poor substitute for real memory, right? RAM is much, much faster than having the PC go back and forth to the HDD.

This has been an interesting discussion so far. Our 5920's are all fairly similar. I think we're all running Vista Premium. There's gotta be a good reason why mine settles down at about 750MB RAM (I disabled Acer Empowerment and a few other things this morning) and other 5920's can't stop munching thru available RAM.

BTW, I booted into Ubuntu 7.10 just to compare. Ubuntu uses about 240 - 250 MB RAM at idle.

 

Colin, just tap Ctrl+Alt+Delete after the lappy is up and running. A new window comes up, click on Task Manager at or near the bottom of the list.
Another new window comes up. Find the "Processes" tab and click on it. This window shows all the running processes. Look across the table - there's a column called "Memory Usage" or "% Memory Usage".

If you click directly on "Memory Usage" at the top of that column (once or maybe twice) it'll order the processes by memory usage. The worst one (with the biggest number) will be at the top of the list once you apply the right click. There's also a short description of what the process does. Write down the top ten. Or use GIMP or Photoshop to take a screenshot if you know how to do that and post it here. We need to get a couple of lists up and see what's doing the damage.

The other thing to do is sit there and watch the list to see which one(s) keep sucking down more and more memory. From what people are describing it doesn't take long for this to happen.

EDIT: This probly doesn't really solve anything, but I wonder what happens if you boot into Safe Mode?

 

I have the Aspire 5920G with the dedicated 8600m GT 256MB card. I also have a low memory problem that arises every once in a while. It doesn't happen very often but it is very annoying when it does.

I've attached a screenshot of my 'performance' tab in the task manager. Where it says physical memory, where I have circled it, it was hovering around 0-5 just a second ago, does that mean I only have that many free physical megabytes of memory? Same problem as you guys? Or is it the 1.10 Gigabyte meter that determines free memory. Also my page file atm is 2963M / 4306M. 2.9 Gigabytes seems like an awful lot for a page file, I want that space! I only have 160 Gigabytes, is that a normal amount for a 2 Gigabyte Ram laptop to have in its page file?

I haven't had the low memory problem in a couple days but it comes and goes, I'll contribue any help I have and will read up on your successes and failures.


Oh, and one more thing, I have ran Windows memory diagnostic tool and it found no errors, if you would be interested in trying, just type memory in the start search area when you click start and it'l be the first thing.

I also am not running Norton at all on my system.

 

To: thelaptopguy

Your issue does sound exactly the same as the one that I have seen. Useful to know that you are not running Norton as that removes one possible culprit. It would be useful, when you next get the problem if you can check on the top few memory hungry processes.

To Telkwa

I can't get at the laptop to check just at the moment - hopefully I might be able to do so over the weekend.

I agree, increasing the virtual memory may avoid the actual low memory error but it must be doing so at the loss of performance so is not really the best long term fix. I still think there must be a memory leak somewhere - perhaps in some of the Acer supplied utilities as I've not seen reports of this problem on any other make/model of laptop.

Interesting to hear your Ubuntu experience - just shows how much of the system Windows wastes!

 

I'd like a full explanation of "Free" memory, as pointed out by laptopguy. I was paying more attention to the vertical column and trendline. If you go back to my screenshot, I have only 2MB "free". I thought that "Cached" is roughly equivalent to "held in reserve" or something similar if you know what I mean.

Did some more experimenting last night. Started Windows in Safe Mode. 0% CPU usage, 19 Processes, 298 MB RAM used (14%). Vista in Safe Mode uses more RAM than Ubuntu's GNOME desktop with half a dozen applications running

Turned off Aero. Went back to Vista Basic (somewhere under the "Personalization and Appearance" tab in Control Panel). dwm.exe had been the largest user of Memory. It dropped to 23rd or 24th place; 1,332K. But when I went back to the Task Manager graph, there was not an abrupt drop in the trend line. Thought that was odd but apparently there's more to this than I understand. Thought the desktop would look horrible without Aero eye candy but didn't notice the loss. Aero's staying off for awhile.

msconfig "Startup" tab shows three Nvidia processes in the list. My 5920 is running Intel graphics. Took a chance and turned them off. Also disabled Acer Empowerment and several others that didn't look necessary. Rebooted. Processes dropped to range of 63 to 66, about 700 MB RAM used (34%).

While googling this morning noticed this comment
"I noticed this also on my Vista installs especially with Nvidia videocards
so if you have one I'd make sure to update to latest Nvidia driver.
It would happen mainly when playing either MS FSX or any 3D game for long periods of time for that matter!"
from this thread

It does seem like the 5920 owners with Nvidia are reporting the memory problems...

 

The biggest culprits in my processes list are dwm.exe and svchost.exe but they have never shown to have taken more than about 50Mb each. In fact the total memory used up by all the processes listed (including processes from all users) would not exceed 200Mb.

I got hold of the SysInternals programs: Process Explorer and Process Monitor (both available in the SysInternals Suite on the Microsoft Technet website). Bizarrely the "available memory" shown from the system information in the Process Explorer is reported as over 1,000,000K, whereas the "Free" physical memory in the Task Manager is shown as 0 Mb! (See the attached screenshot) Surely "Available" physical memory and "Free" physical memory are the same thing? Why does the Task manager report my free physical memory as zero?

I want to totally wipe the hard disk and install Windows from new but I don't have a Windows Installation disk, only the Acer Restore Factory Default image on a hidden hard disk partition (which will be removed in a hard disk wipe!) I hate all the extra rubbish that gets installed, and I don't trust what has gone onto the system before I've even started using it.

I'd like to look at putting Linux onto the laptop and dual boot with Windows Vista if necessary. Does Linux have all the drivers for this laptop? - Telkwa, can you let me know if you had any problems installing Ubuntu, and also can you let me know how the hard drive is partitioned for your setup?

I'm rapidly giving up on solving the slowness of Windows Vista on this laptop and looking at using something else instead. I'm still worried this issue may be caused by the integrated graphics memory. Does anybody with the seperate Nvidia card in their laptop suffer this problem? One more thing, why do the nvidia drivers appear on the startup (from msconfig) when there is no Nvidia card in my machine? Is this from poor Acer installation routines? I'm confused and annoyed, both with Microsoft and Acer.

 

I have the 5920 with the separate graphics card and still had the low memory error. I have not checked the detailed process memory usage yet as I don't currently have access to the laptop.

 

I've just found a useful site that explains the memory usage figures in Task Manager very helpfully. It should help with these discussions. See:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000393.html

As I thought, one of the things it points out is that RAM is used as a disk cache so ideally you do want free memory to be as low as possible. It is the committed memory figures that are more relevant.

 

Sorry dont know how to screen dump a picture etc.

my top five are:
AppSvc32.exe .....none specified 67,600K
svchost.exe ....... System ...... 57,452K
dwm.exe ........... Hayley ...... 18,528K
explorer.exe ....... Hayley ...... 18,252K
svchost.exe ....... System ...... 13,976K
svchost.exe ....... System ...... 11,148K

after that there are a further 5 processes between 5,000K and 9,999K and remaining 62 processes at less than 4,500K

note that I am still using the Rob fix re virtual memory, free memory ranges from 90 to 120mb

I have now put the virtual memory back to allow the system to set it.

my top five are as above

AppSvc32.exe .....none specified 67,600K
svchost.exe ....... System ...... 44,612K
dwm.exe ........... Hayley ...... 17,224K
explorer.exe ....... Hayley ...... 10,248K
svchost.exe ....... System ...... 8,840K

free memory stabilises at around 54mb.....has now gone down to between 1 and 9mb (after 10mins).

in both cases the processes stabilise after 5mins AppSvc32.exe moves down to around 3,010K

Col

 

Hi Col,

Task manager does not give a great deal of information about the source of each process. In particular the ones like svchost which can be used for several different things. You might find it more useful to download the Microsoft sysinternals process monitoring tool from the link below:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

This should give more info. about what each process is really doing although you will have to go into the View/Select columns menu in order to add in memory usage to the display. If you double-click on a line in the display and then choose the Image tab you can even see the command line that launched the process.

 

I've just realised that on Vista you can get more of the detailed information from Task Manager. It is described well on the link below. I'd been looking at Task Manager on XP and had not noticed this nice new feature on Vista.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...-manager-to-see-file-name-of-running-process/


Also, looking at Egghead's earlier screenshot showing Task Manager's resource monitor window, the total committed memory is still less than 2GB so, if I have read the various information I have looked up correctly, that is not too unhealthy - it depends on how much load the system was under and how much this changes as more applications are loaded?

 

Hi Rob

Have downloaded the sysinternals process monitoring tool on my PC, my daughter has now gone off with her laptop so will have to get it off her again during the weekend. I also noticed the new facility on task manager but I was and still am having difficulty understanding what it all means. At one stage the Disk part of the resourse overview was going manic after downloading the hotfix mentioned earlier.

Cheers

Col

 

I'm writing this from work, so replies might be a bit discombobulated. I've been thinking about this memory leakage thing wrong. Take a read thru the wikipedia entry.

Whether you have 50 or 100 processes running, all it takes is one poorly coded program that doesn't know how to let go of physical memory. That one program keeps scooping up memory, bit by bit, and doesn't know how to let go of it.

So the trick would be finding the one or two poorly coded programs that aren't handling physical memory correctly.

Also, read something that explained the Cached vs. Free question. Vista aggressively tries to allocate memory to something - anything - while XP just leaves the memory unassigned.

egghead, I'd be happy to put something together regarding dual-booting. I'm not a linux expert, and the lack of broadband at home has really hampered my progress. But I've installed Linux dozens of times, and can tell you exactly what I did to get it going on my 5920. Including the things that you don't want to do.

A couple of things aren't working quite right in Linux. Some of the little Acer hotkeys don't do anything, but those are niggling details that I don't care about. The left speaker doesn't work on the laptop chassis. Headphones sound fine. I expect alsa (the linux sound program) will probably run the speakers better in the next version of Ubuntu, due out in about four months.
The Intel 4965 wireless card is a little flaky. Only runs at about half the speed it does in vista. But it's a new card and I expect the drivers to improve there, too. The dual-monitor features aren't as refined as in vista. You can clone the monitors but not run extended. This also should be improved in next version. I sure sound like an optimist don't I

If you've got broadband, download and burn to a CD GPartedLiveCD

You have to know how to burn .iso's. It's not the same as just burning data.

Also download/burn an Ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download. You can boot from one of these and "test-run" the OS without installing anything. Same thing - must be burned as .iso or an image.

We're not done yet. Back at that same Ubuntu LiveCD website, look for the little checkbox at the bottom of the page to download the alternate install CD. These are more reliable for installing than the LiveCD.

Have you made your Recovery Discs? Critical that you have because you may have to re-install Vista before we're done. Back up whatever personal data you have.

I gotta go back to work. Will have to figure out how much info I can pack into an attachment!

EDIT: I knew I'd written up a short description of the fun I had -
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=198929
If I did it again, I'd use the Vista utility to move Vista, then do everything else with GParted. If you read the thread, you'll see that I ended up with one big Vista partition. All the other partitions were gone. You can't put more than four partitions on a drive, so the original Acer setup is problematic.
If you've decided to start over, you could help me answer a big question I have after my experience. What I need to know is, does the HDD partitioning look the same after running the recovery discs or do some of the partitions disappear?
See, I wiped the drive - well, partially wiped it - before using the recovery discs. Ended up with one C:\ drive.
So if you were willing to run your recovery discs just to see what it looks like afterwards, that would help me in suggesting the most efficient way to proceed with dual-boot.

 

OK, I've had a chance to experiment a bit today with the 5920 and I think I'm beginning to understand what is going on.

I reduced the initial virtual memory cache to 2500 and left the max at 6144.

I then loaded in lots of different tasks and kept a careful eye on Task Manager, Resource Manager and Process Explorer.

One thing to say immediately is that the physical RAM free value is not relevant - this must be the amount free after Windows has loaded everything possible into its memory cache to save time and the lower this figure is then the faster the laptop should run.

Instead I monitored physical RAM usage in Resource Monitor and that stayed fairly constant between 65% and 71% even with lots of very large tasks loaded.

However, after I'd been doing this for a while I checked the virtual memory allocation again (via the system option in the control panel) and the allocated virtual memory had gone up from its initial 2500MB to 5830MB - i.e. almost reaching its limit.

A little while later the low memory error appeared. When it did the physical memory on the Task Manager performance tab showed that a chache of 1313MB was still available which Windows could have discarded to release memory if it was running out of physical RAM.

I am now convinced that the low memory error refers only to Virtual Memory and not physical RAM.

This means that either something is using up too much virtual memory or something is not releasing it properly.

The top few process users of virtual memory a litle before the error message were as shown in the attached scren shot. The top VM using process was Messenger while the second is shown as ccSvcHst.exe as is actually part of the Norton Internet Suite.

I'm not quite sure where this all gets us, particularly since thelaptopguy said earlier in this thread that he had the error message but is not running Norton. If he hadn't then I'd have suspected Norton as some of the other processes also belong to it - just shows how much resource it takes! If not Norton then perhaps it means the problem is Messenger?

Has anyone ever had the low memory error message when Messenger was not running? It certainly seems to use a lot of resource!

 

Rob -
What if you unplugged from the internet and temporarily disabled everything related to Norton in startup? Then run your test again.
I've gotta download that sysinternals thing...

Have heard lots of bad things and very few if any good about Windows Live Messenger.

 

Gosh Rob, that's a lot of Page Faults coming from Messenger! Sure doesn't look healthy.

 

Messenger does seem incredibly resource hungry!

Good idea about Norton - that could be worth a try but I may not get access to the laptop again now for another week :-( The trouble is that without the internet I can't run Messenger either so even if the problem does not recur it won't be conclusive.

If I can get the computer for an extended period it would be worth trying disabling Norton, loading some of the free anti-virus s/w and anti spyware s/w and using Windows built in firewall for a while.

If anyone else wants to give it a try, then the way to provoke the problem sooner should be to set the maximum virtual memory fairly small - perhaps 3000MB and then try running lots of different tasks while monitoring memory and virtual memory usage. If initial memory is smaller e.g. 2048MB then return to the virtual memory setting page every so often and you will be able to see if more has been allocated to the initial setting and how close it has got to the maximum.

Interestingly, in my test earlier the low memory message came up after I had closed a number of the tasks that I had run. (I thought it wasn't going to fail so I closed a number and went back to normal use for a while.) It really does look as though virtual memory is not being released properly.