[clark33]

Ive got a high spec PC, so i know my RAM will be coping with the CPU instructions - but:

When i click on performance tab to measure my available RAM, where it says Physical Memory then Available. It measures it in (k). Is this kilobytes? Ive got 453984 available, which im guessing is around half a Gig, under 500 Megabytes. Is this a normal figure?

[office politics]

you typically wont notice a performance hit until available memory drops under 5 mb (5000k)

there's the page file as well though so if you have 20000-40000 available, your system would prolly be swapping data off and on your hard drive which takes longer than if it were all in the memory chips.



also, what OS?

[clark33]

i see! dont think my pc would drop from 450,000 free to 5000 free in a hurry! I now see the benefits of having 1 Gig of Ram. I know extra RAM increases performance but would there be much point to upgrading from a Gig?

According to what you say - looks like my page file will never be used, as theres always space to process of the RAM directly rather than swapping it to virtual?

[office politics]

I vaguely remember reading that a windows machine always uses the page file; regardless of how much ram is in use.

on my machine now, i open performance from admin tools, click a new counter set and click veiw report. add a counter % usage from the performance object paging file. it shows that im using .9 of my paging file.

if i add the counter available mbytes from the memory object it tells me i have 300+ mb available.


this should mean that the page file is always in use.