Legit Reviews

I know that 3ds max 8 and Photoshop CS2 are memory intensive. I know running iTunes requires memory. But THIS MUCH? I mean, the Task Manager is reporting 300MB "free" and the system cache about 300MB. So why aren't programs using ALL the RAM they can get?

Simple, you have to leave some pagefile and RAM for the kernel to run its processes, as they can vary in how much pagefile or RAM they use (the processes is what you see when you ctrl+alt+del in Win XP Pro and you click on the "Processes" tab, if you keep an eye on em, you'll see it varies almost constantly in CPU and memory usage). If the programs tried to use every bit of RAM and pagefile space, you would start getting VM errors and Windows would crash......hard!! Trust me, I know because I'm running WinXP Pro with Kaspersky AV, Trillian, and ZoneAlarm on 192 MB of SDRAM, PC100, and a 750MB pagefile all on a K6-2 500 MHz, and it's slow as Christmas most of the time, if not all the time. I know I'll have someone disagree with me, but this is what I know from experience, don't know every detail about the mechanics of how it works together, but rather how it's affected my system resources.

btw, that 750 MB pagefile is on a 60GB ATA100 HDD, 7200RPM, and it's manually set to that as the default is around 275 MB.

I'm thinking it's just that you've got a lot of inactive processes. Windows pages those to disk if you're not using them to free up physical memory for other applications.

yeah, that's true too, and you can disable some of them as some of them don't have that much significance, but you have to be careful of what processes you terminate otherwise you could inadvertantly cause the OS not to load (some of those processes are required by the kernel to load Windows, had a friend disable some of his processes, and had to wipe his drive, lol).....I just don't think it's worth the trouble unless it's really that important to you.

I forgot to mention that the programs I am running in the foreground (3ds max etc) run dog slow when the pagefile is this large...