The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Major Ram Issue

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by craig007, Oct 29, 2008.

  1. craig007

    craig007 Notebook Geek

    Reputations:
    1
    Messages:
    87
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Whenever I play any game, FSX is the most recent, my RAM usage never goes above 65% whilst playing the game. Very strange, is it a hardware problem or software?

    The RAM usage has been double checked with the task manager and Nvidia Monitor View.

    Any thoughts?
     
    craig007, Oct 29, 2008
    #1
  2. yomamasfavourite

    yomamasfavourite Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    51
    Messages:
    681
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    I think if you have a small amount of ram installed vista is forced to use less. lets say around 900mbs, given that 1.3gbs is being used, that means the game is using 400mbs which is a fair enough amount.

    Is there a particular reason you're worried about this?
    Do you notice lag in games, slow loading times, exceptional hard drive usage etc.?
    You could always check if vista is using pagefile a lot.
     
    yomamasfavourite, Oct 29, 2008
    #2
  3. MTHall51

    MTHall51 Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    11
    Messages:
    378
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    I am not sure about this, but do think that the last post may have a good point about RAM being a fairly small amount for Vista. Are you running Ultimate or Home version of Vista?
     
    MTHall51, Oct 29, 2008
    #3
  4. craig007

    craig007 Notebook Geek

    Reputations:
    1
    Messages:
    87
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    I'm running home premium.

    I'm concerned because performance isn't what it was. I doubt more ram would make a difference (?)

    I increased the pagefile to 4096 when I was tweaking with Vista.

    Pagefile is at 1700MB. Very strange thing I also noticed, I can be happily bumbling along at 28 FPS, then it will drop to about 8, then 30 seconds later back up to 30 odd. Is this a RAM, GPU or CPU problem?
     
    craig007, Oct 30, 2008
    #4
  5. PhoenixFx

    PhoenixFx Notebook Virtuoso

    Reputations:
    744
    Messages:
    3,083
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    105
    Let Windows handle the page file, I don’t see how manually increasing the page can be considered a tweak. Having a large pagefile might explain why your memory usage never goes over 65% (assuming that pagefile is also counted as memory by whatever the program you use to measure memory usage).

    If frame rate drops suddenly but goes back up again, then it might be due to some background process.
     
    PhoenixFx, Oct 30, 2008
    #5
  6. yomamasfavourite

    yomamasfavourite Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    51
    Messages:
    681
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    Having frame rates drop or having the game slow down could possibly be due to the system using pagefile.

    bty pagefile is not a good thing, its crap it slows system performance significantly, I would be trying to reduce the amount the system can use, not increase it.

    also more ram would make a BIG diffence, its possibly the single cheapest way of increasing system performance.
    Especially with vista (can waste up to 1.2Gbs on its own) the more you have the better.
     
    yomamasfavourite, Oct 30, 2008
    #6