RAM question

[dodge20]

I have a computer with 512MB Ram. I checked to see how much is available after a restart and it is right about 300. To me this seems like a lot once the computer is initally started. I have several programs that run once the machine is started, but it isn't out of the ordinary. Is this normal? And if not, how would I go about fixing it.


Dodge20

 

[Jontmke]

That sounds like the usual. While Microsoft claims you can run XP with less, I think and have heard elsewhere, the minumum really is about 256mb.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[wooglin]

I just doubled my laptops memory to 512 from 256 and there is a noticible in the speed of XP. I doubt that I'd see any major difference in going any higher though. Not to say that 256 was slow, but a lot of disk access. 512 is nice.

 

[brainfunk]

Dodge20,

The laptop I am on has 512 and 327 free. You can get more speed and use less memory if you undo a lot of the dazzle crap in the Peformance tab of the System properties and in the Display properties. I also witness performance gains by forcing the kernel to stay resident in memory and by specifying the actual size of my L2 cache. WinGuides has a nice tweak manager that is fun to play with:

http://www.winguides.com/tweak/.