System Resource Use

[Syzygy]

I('m just wondering if somebody could tell me why my system seems to use heaps of my RAM. I have a mIRC script that tells me that at times 98% of my 512MB DDR RAM is being used. I see that the overall performance of my system is slow. When I looked at the free system resources last night it showed I had only 53% free. What does this mean and is this normal. I have heard that windows can use alot of ram just cause it's available, is this normal and true. The pc has crashed once after this slowdown.
I have installed the latest drivers for the ALi chipset and the other hardware. The only thing I haven't done is flashed the BIOS but have never done this before and am hesitant too. Anyone have any explanations or ideas?

My PC specs:

ASUS A7A-266E Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP+ 1900 with heatsink and fan
512 MB PC2100 DDRRAM
Leadtek Winfast GeForce 3 Ti500 64MBDDR 3D Card
Soundblaster Live! Value
Seagate 60 Gig 7200 ATA100 HDD
Lite-On CD-W/RW 40x24x10
Windows 98SE OS
300W PSU

[mjc]

OK, first thing, when you first boot up, what is your percentage of free resources?

And yes at default settings Windows will eat massive amounts of RAM, for a disk cache. Which is possibly a means to increase performance, but inorder to actually be of benefit you must not be using your swap file. You say you machine starts to drag and get slow when most of your RAM is used, then you are probably going using the swapfile.



So, we need to figure out what is loading at start up and whether or not you are using the swapfile.

ctrl-alt-del once to bring up the taskmanager, do this after a fresh boot and see what is running.

Then, setup sysmon to monitor swapfile, and run it while you use your machine like you normally do.

After you get that info, we will have something to work from.

[gwallen4]

Nice system - it should really crank.

Is this a new system or have you had it running for a while and then it started slowing down?

Have you scanned for viruses?

Do you have some program running in the background that is hogging system resources? Try closing these programs using Alt-Ctrl-Del (leave Explorer running). Remove programs from the task bar also.

Have you installed DirectX 8.1?

If it were my computer and I didn't have too much stuff loaded, I would start over with a fresh format of C: and a clean installation of WIN98. This should solve the problem and may be an easier solution then spending hours trying to locate the problem.

But then again you could wait a few hours until all the big guns have checked in.

[RudedogTx]

I would listen to MJC...it is better than a clean start...



:D

[Mark Miller]

Sorry for all the dumb questions, but I thought that xp was able to use resources better than the 9x,s and that this really should not be a problem anymore. i have 37 processes when I boot, yet I have 90% resourses free. What am I doing right.
p4 1.8gig 512 ddr 120 gig hd