HP Forum Archive 19

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O.T. XP RAM utilization Message #1 Posted by designnut on 4 June 2009, 11:48 a.m. I recently had 2GB of RAM installed which is recognized in my 2001 computer, and 2 new hard drives. It is faster by far, but the system never uses more than 25% of the RAM. Everything it has pagefiled and cached and swapped would easily fit in RAM, yet it doesn't use it. I use Everest to look into my computer and can see all this. Does anyone know of a fix to get XP out of the beta stage? Sam

Re: O.T. XP RAM utilization Message #2 Posted by Dave Britten on 4 June 2009, 12:06 p.m., in response to message #1 by designnut If you're looking at Task Manager, the "PF Usage" label is a bit misleading. It really means, "This is how much memory is allocated". If that amount happens to be within the size of your physical memory, there shouldn't be any paging going on. If it's larger, then you're going to see some paging. I recall they changed that label to indicate what the figure actually reflects in Vista. The System Cache number just tells you how much RAM is being used to cache disk I/O, and probably some other stuff. This RAM is relinquished if a process needs it, but Windows figures it might as well put it to some use if nobody else is using it, and so it uses it for caching to improve performance. I'm not familiar with Everest, so I don't know what kind of metrics it provides. What sort of numbers is it showing you?

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