total physical memory vs available physical memory

Hey all,

I own an old IBM Thinkpad R31 and I was just performing some maintenance on it and noticed that my total physical memory was reported as 256 MB as expected; however my available physical memory is only 46.25 MB!

What's the deal?

 

Wow, 256MB is quite less. What OS you're running, XP, Win2000?

The amount of RAM (physical memory) installed in the system is 256Meg, and the amount of RAM being used by the OS is around 209.75MB, with 46.25MB free.

You should think about adding more RAM, if not buying a new notebook.

 

I am running XP. I am going to upgrade to 1GB of RAM I think.

Thanks for your help.

 

Each time you start a program or a background process begins, the system allocates a specified amount of RAM for the application or process to run. Over time, if you don't restart your system (and even if you do) the amount of available RAM will diminish over time. The reason for this is that the system doesn't give back the same amount of RAM that it uses for the process or program, so each time some RAM is lost when a program/process shuts down and becomes unavailable for usage again by the system. The 2 are known as "Used RAM" and "Available RAM".

Over time, if you don't restart or use a RAM management/reclamation utility, your available RAM resources will reach critical levels; at that point, your system will start using your hard drive as a virtual RAM source. As it progresses, the problem gets worse if you don't correct it, and it really sucks if you only have one drive. Eventually your CPU will be running at 100% and things will slow down until a point where it'll eventually lock up if you do nothing. Most people usually shut their systems down or restart before that happens so many don't usually see the problem at its extreme, but they do experience it in when playing media files - when available resources are low and the drive is being used as a VR source, the system slowdown causes stuttering in the media file playback. That's usually the best indication you've got a resource management problem.

However, all is not lost Grasshopper - there exists within the deepest, darkest realm of the Internet (Tenebril.com) a program known by its ancient name - Memory Boost. Essentially it's a RAM management and memory reclamation utility. It monitors Used and Available RAM, and you can set upper and lower limits to target when your available RAM gets to a level you don't like, or you need to free up more RAM resources to run a RAM intensive program so you don't experience slowdowns. Before I was able to finally afford to max out the RAM on all of my systems a while back, I used Memory Boost regularly because I use RAM intense programs, but I only had a 1/2 gig of RAM. Having the ability to reclaim RAM the system doesn't give back to you automatically is great.

It also has a Detective feature that shows you all of the RAM hogs running on your system so you can either shut them down, or target them for the Startup Manager to keep from automatically starting when Windows boots up. Most users have way too many processes running in the background, and Memory Boost helps even out the problem.

Even though it's fairly inexpensive (just under $30) you can download and use it as a full trial version for about a month if I remember right. Try it out and you'll understand better how your system utilizes RAM. MB can be set to show an icon in the System Tray that shows you your current percentage of available RAM - if that amount goes below a setpoint you've established, it'll turn red and flag you for a Boost, which is just a term for the program reclaiming the Used RAM that wasn't given back to the system.

You can download Memory Boost at this URL: http://www.tenebril.com/consumer/memboost/ If you use it right you won't have to increase your RAM any, unless you find out by using it that your system is really using resources at a rate that even Memory Boost can't help you with - but that's normally not the case.

 

Does that even boot XP?

Just kidding, maybe you should think about upgrading your RAM or getting a new machine.

 

yeah xp works fine....works just as well today as it did in 2002

 

You should notice a substantial jump in performance going from 256mb to 1gb!