availible physical memory

[SpeckledJim]

how come its says in my system info that i have 512MB total memory but only
307.22MB availible what does this mean?

[saphalline]

Because you have 307.22MB free when running your computer. Don't worry, this is quite normal. Remember, Windows itself (or any OS for that matter) also needs RAM to run. So the other 204.78MB is being used by Windows upon booting up your computer. The 307.22MB free is more than half your RAM, so this is available to any program you open (like a game or MS Word or whatever).

Different apps will use different amounts of RAM depending on how much they need. Little things like the Windows Calculator will use up a tiny amount (about 2.5MB by the look of it). I have 1GB of RAM, and it looks like about 480MB are currently being used. I have, of course, WinXP Pro running, as well as two windows of Mozilla, WMP, Windows Calculator, the Task Manager, and several things in the taskbar including MBM 5, Alcohol 120%, and my printer drivers. This leaves me with about 544MB of RAM free (actually a little more because of the way Windows uses RAM and the page file together).

This is also why we all recommend that users of WinXP have at least 512MB of RAM. If you had 256MB and 204.78MB used by Windows alone, you'd be running pretty tight! Actually Windows would use less RAM if you had less total RAM, but still, WinXP alone has a large RAM footprint. WinXP technically requires 64MB of RAM just to install and 128MB of RAM just to run WinXP alone. So 256MB of RAM is as low as I would go for XP!

[SpeckledJim]

thanks again