How much RAM?

Penn

Penn

Dancing Up A Storm
:smile: This may be a dumb question, because I'm still in the neophyte stage of home computing;

How much RAM should Windows XP Home Edition be using up?

I have a garden variety HP machine with an Athlon 1.4G processor
and 512megs of DDR PC133 RAM installed.

I also have a program called FreeRamPro which apparently monitors RAM usage in my PC. It routinely drops down to 285megs, sometimes 275megs.

What I'm asking is: is that normal?
 
sleuth

sleuth

Livin' Like Thanksgivin'
Originally posted by penncam
:smile: This may be a dumb question, because I'm still in the neophyte stage of home computing;

How much RAM should Windows XP Home Edition be using up?

I have a garden variety HP machine with an Athlon 1.4G processor
and 512megs of DDR PC133 RAM installed.

I also have a program called FreeRamPro which apparently monitors RAM usage in my PC. It routinely drops down to 285megs, sometimes 275megs.

What I'm asking is: is that normal?
Click to expand...

Ideally as little as possible...
But it is not uncommon for windows to use it if ya got it...
My guess is that left alone, XP will suck up anything from 128 MB to 256 MB. Anything above that is likely to be other programs you're using (such as FreeRamPro, Internet Explorer, Outlook, or a firewall maybe).
 
Penn

Penn

Dancing Up A Storm
I had ZoneAlarm installed, but I found it was interfering with other programs that were running; froze up the PC, and I had to go to the Task Manager and end it.

My ISP is Earthlink, so I talked - Chatted on-line with them and they said get rid of the firewall; the freeze ups have quit.

Since then, I only utilise the weak-sister Internal Firewall that XP has built in. No problems so far.

It just seems that this sucker eats a lot of RAM
 
W

Warron

Member
I always thought it was curious when 200 Meg of RAM was in use, but my computer was sitting idle with nothing but windows running, but it is normal. Windows just loads a bunch of commonly used stuff into ram, just in case you might use it. When you start another program that requires more ram then is available, windows will surrender the ram as required down to its minimum.

I have never had problems with Zonealarm myself. But I just got windows xp and have not tried zonealarm on it yet. I would like to have something better then the built in firewall though. I have no confidence in it.
 
sleuth

sleuth

Livin' Like Thanksgivin'
Originally posted by penncam
I had ZoneAlarm installed, but I found it was interfering with other programs that were running; froze up the PC, and I had to go to the Task Manager and end it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the latest release of ZoneAlarm has a bug in it that lets a file called vsmon.exe run off with all your resources...

ZoneAlarm is still a great product, and I'm hoping they'll fix the bug in a later release. Until then, I'm like you... I have to use the weak XP firewall.
 
Penn

Penn

Dancing Up A Storm
Another of my pet peeves is these d@mned Pop -Ups I keep getting when I log on to USA Today! Orbitz, Cheap Tickets, etc.

What are you guys doing about that on your machines?
 
fuzzyng

fuzzyng

New Member
Originally posted by penncam
Another of my pet peeves is these d@mned Pop -Ups I keep getting when I log on to USA Today! Orbitz, Cheap Tickets, etc.

What are you guys doing about that on your machines?
Click to expand...

There are plenty of new Pop-Up blockers, now, so you may wanna go to download.com or hotfiles.com and search for em...
 
sleuth

sleuth

Livin' Like Thanksgivin'
Originally posted by penncam
Another of my pet peeves is these d@mned Pop -Ups I keep getting when I log on to USA Today! Orbitz, Cheap Tickets, etc.

What are you guys doing about that on your machines?
Click to expand...

I use one called "Pop-up Preventer" (http://www.softpile.com/Internet/Browsers_and_Plug-Ins/Review_12380_index.html)

It's not perfect but it stops most of them. Only bad thing is that it requires you to toggle it off from the system tray (lower right hand corner of your screen) if you actually want to view a pop-up.
 
Penn

Penn

Dancing Up A Storm
Pop up Blocker..

:smile: :cheers: Hey guys thanks! Seems to work just fine.

The other option I wish it that it had buy i don't see
so far is "selective" blocks like my older one had.

But hey, it works.
 
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