Asus G1S on XP32bit 2GB - out of memory problems

Hi, new guy in here, and I need a bit of help.

I have a problem with G1s, XP installed, 2GB of memory (so not 4GB as in many post in here with memory problems) everything is working as it should (followed the excellent install instructions found here: http://www.ocshoot.no/binaries/AsusG1S/) Was not able to install the matrix storage drivers but this should not be the cause (or is it?)

I seem to end up some kind of memory problems in several memory intensive games:

Civilization IV == after playing _normally_ about 1-1.5 hours game lags couple of times, then even freezes totally, When alt+ tab to windows, I get an error when trying to access the system resources monitor (Ctrl + alt + del). After I kill the Civ IV everything works normally.

Football manager 2008 == about same story, 1-1.5 hours of gameplay and game refuses to save (out of memory error).

Dominions 3 == similar problems in longer gameplay.

I have installed latest nvidia drivers from laptop2go (the ones released in end of december), did not fix the issue so most likely not a display driver memory issue.

I am currently running memtest86+ to see if my memory chips are corrupter, but it seems a driver / configuration issue of some sort.

Please give sophisticated guesses of what might be wrong.

 

How much virtual memory are you allocating?

 

how can you be sure it´s the ram causing the trouble ?

your problem could have several reasons :

- your graphics card or some other component(vram ?) is overheating.

- even though you have changed the the driver, maybe some software related to graphics ( driver,control panel.....) is having a memory leak

 

Cant check now, Memtest86+ is still running. I was thinking also that this might be a some sort of virtual memory issue. The virtual memory allocation is not changed from default value.

I have not used XP over 5 years (been linux user, but gaming in linux just sucks

I have to check this after the memtest is done, currently no errors and it really does not look/feel like faulty memory chip but just to be sure.

EDIT: I think that overheating is not the issue, because I can run 3D-games like NHL 08 / GTA as long as I want without problems.

Memory leak of some sort from faulty driver / software is possible

 

You can start the performance monitor and add a used memory gauge. Then start gaming, turn off the game, and check perfmon. You should be able to tell if there is a memory leak (mem should continually increase).

 

Ok, I run memtest86+ couple of times, no errors so hardware should be ok.

I doubled the virtual memory of XP and after this it seemed that Civilization IV problems stopped but today with extensive tests with dominions 3, I first got game to crash couple of times (crash > restart the game, load > crash etc.) thrown back to desktop I go to my computer and click "properties", first time error (these not-so-informative-numberletter-errors), try again and I get:

"C:\Windows\system32\rundll32.exe"
Not enough quota is available to process this command

SO it really seems that memory is being used and not freed properly (so in other words memory leak problem).

Ctrl+Alt+Del gives me "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000017) Click ok to terminate the application.
After this "The application or DLL C:\Program Files\ASUS\ASUS Direct console\MSNHOOK.DLL is not a valid Windows Image. Please check against installation diskette.

So ... this gets me thinking if it really is some other software in background leaking , not the game's or just a general memory leak issue because of bad driver.

Currently running programs (that are started by default when computer starts): MS messenger, Asus Mult******, Asus Direct console, the wireless network program & bluetooth connection program, Power4Gear+ utility. symantec endpoint protection. I usually kill mult******, direct console and messenger because they are useless (so should be uninstalled.)

<computer restart>

I started the performance monitor (did not close any programs listed above) and continue playing.

 

I tested today several games but could not trace any of the softwares reserving more and more memory. Also overall memory consumption was quite the same all the time, no fatal crashes either on any of games.

It is possible that something triggers this memory leakage and increase of memory usage is quite fast so it might be harder to notice before any real problems start.

Must keep debugging.

 

It might also be a bug with a driver, or the particular games (less likely because it's more than one game that does it).

 

Maybe this will help: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888413

 

Also I really hope you are not running ASUS bloatware (Live Update to be precise) in the background. It's known to have memory leaks.