As the companion question to Carnac’s last dumb question (re: Windows Media Player and my one 350 MB song :rolleyes: ), I’ve just noticed more odd behavior. My PC, BTW, is virus and spyware free, or so it seems.
When visiting a Chicago Tribune website, I did a quick Alt Control Delete and brought up the Windows Task Manager. Current PF Usage was almost 400 MB. CPU Usage bounced between 8 - 20 %. (Note that I’m not calculating pi to the ten trillionth decimal place. I’m just sitting and reading.)
Is PF Usage = RAM usage? If so, why does my PC need so much RAM to just sit there on a static web page?
>>> Also, I then cut and pasted a news item from the Chicago Tribune site onto an MS Word document. Didn’t work. A MS Word alert window popped open and said: “There is insufficient memory on disk space. Close extra windows and save your work.”
Huh? I had only 2 windows open–the Chicago Trib’s and my MS document. My Dell has a ~ 2.3 gig processor, 520 MB RAM, and tons of room on the HD.
What gives?
(Just sitting here typing on SDMB takes 369 MB of RAM, or whatever. Why?)
Did you look in the processes tab to see what exactly is using that memory? press mem usage to sort the table in order of most at the top least at the bottom. My total mem usage here is about 355MB, but Explorer is only using about 25MB to display the SDMB.
Also, windows is doing a surprising amount of work, constantly polling for and responding to messages. There’s an app that tracks windows messages (that tell windows something happened) and when you move amouse around the messages zoom by, because of all the mouseover events in all the apps and stuff.
Not a very technical answer, but basically it takes that much memory for the OS to be running.
There is a common misconception (partly sponsored by makers of quixotic software that “reduced memory usage” and misunderstandings of various technical issues) that having less memory in use is a Good Thing. It isn’t. Ideally, you’d want almost all your RAM to be in active use (or holding “standby” data, just in case)
Empty nonvolatile (HDD) storage has value, because you can’t “dump” its current contents elsewhere quickly and retrievably when you need more. Empty RAM is just wasted potential. A certain amount is nice, so you can load new data without first swapping the current contents to the HDD swap file, but this benefit is minimal on today’s machines, which typically have memory in 100s/1000s of megabytes (My PCs have more MB than the first half-dozen hard drives I owned!) Today’s PCs rarely “thrash” (spend all their time moving data between the swap file and RAM) except under extremely heavy multitasking loads.
if I had 512 MB, and was only using the browser, I’d be quite happy if 400MB+ were alloted to the browser, 64MB were being used by the OS, and the rest was a “reserve”. If my browser was only allotted 100MB (half of which would be my browser cache) that would leave 300 MB of RAM wasted, useless.
There is actually very little need for even 50MB reserve – that’s a lot of bytes, and though the system bus would be able to fill it quickly, there would be very little computational need to do so on a typical desktop.