Mar 18, 2007, 04:10 AM // 04:10
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#1
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Perfectly Elocuted
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Idle PC RAM usage?
I have 2 gigs of ram, but I've noticed that even without a browser/active program My computer is using about 400-500k of ram. Is this normal? Do things disable when I'm playing a game, etc? Or is this ram pretty much useless?
__________________
" Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to."
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Mar 18, 2007, 08:04 AM // 08:04
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#2
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Ascalonian Squire
Join Date: Oct 2005
Profession: R/
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You can easily use that much ram if you lots of stuff running in the background.
Running bloated apps like Norton's, having spyware/adware, etc. all contribute.
Last edited by tobash; Mar 18, 2007 at 08:09 AM // 08:09..
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Mar 18, 2007, 08:41 AM // 08:41
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#3
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Frost Gate Guardian
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Hawaii
Guild: FPS
Profession: Mo/Me
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SnipiousMax
I have 2 gigs of ram, but I've noticed that even without a browser/active program My computer is using about 400-500k of ram. Is this normal? Do things disable when I'm playing a game, etc? Or is this ram pretty much useless?
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Windows Task Manager --> Processes
That should show how the available memory is used.
By the way, 400-500k is nothing.
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Mar 18, 2007, 09:01 AM // 09:01
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#4
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Frost Gate Guardian
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Washington, USA
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I'm going to assume you mean 400-500MB, not KB. And yes, this does sound excessive - you probably have some utilities and/or spyware that are hogging your memory. Anything you see residing in the system tray is another program resident in memory.
Regarding if this memory is "useless"... Windows is also pretty good about figuring out which apps are actively needing memory and which are not. That's the purpose of a swap file - generally speaking, if Guild Wars (or some other game or application) needs RAM that has been allocated by some other process, Windows will try to swap the inactive application's memory to disk, thereby freeing up memory for the active program.
However, because the hard drive is so much slower than memory, this can cause performance degradation. This is why having a lot of RAM in your system can improve performance - it prevents the need for swapping memory to disk when multiple programs are trying to allocate memory.
BTW, you can bring up Process Manager by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Esc. Click on the Processes Tab, and Click on Mem Useage to sort by this field (clicking repeatedly reverses sort order). If you're not sure what a process is (Image Name field) - just Google it to find out.
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Mar 18, 2007, 11:00 PM // 23:00
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#5
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Academy Page
Join Date: Jun 2006
Guild: Resistant Force
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if you post a few screenshots of processes ill take a look for you. also, What operating system are you using ?
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Mar 19, 2007, 06:31 PM // 18:31
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#6
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Perfectly Elocuted
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DutchGun
I'm going to assume you mean 400-500MB, not KB. And yes, this does sound excessive - you probably have some utilities and/or spyware that are hogging your memory.
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Yes that is what I meant. A quarter of my 2 gigs.
As far as I can tell, it's not spyware. I've three different Anti-spyware/adware programs that I run on a regular basis. And I use Zone Alarm Firewall (that as far as I've read is a good one). My anti-virus isn't supposed to be reasource intensive (Kaspersky). I googled through the list of processes, and apart from Google Desktop, My antivirus, my firewall, and a bizillion processes that we're labeled as "essential for the stability of your computer", there's nothing else I can find to cut out. I've tried running it with and without Google desktop, but it really doesn't make much of a difference.
I did notice that a number of Processes were on the list twice (or four-five times, like Svchost.exe) I'm not sure if that's significant or not?
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