Surlent
Posts: 914/1077 |
Software what empties RAM is pretty useless. If you plan to use something like Adobe Photoshop CS 2, you can't have enough RAM and even with 1 GB of RAM it won't stop filling Windows' page file. To empty your RAM, usually it is enough to clean the clipboard, like open up a text document, select a single character, copy it,done. And about RAM usage it heavily depends on your computer and the operating system. Windows usually requires at least twice as much RAM as stated in the system requirements to run smoothly. If you use Windows XP, MS states it needs at least 64 MB or RAM ... and also with 128 MB it won't run smoothly at all - unless you turn off all additional effects like menu animation and such.
If you have tons of start-up items in your bar, like iPodService.exe if you own that music player, the OpenOffice wizard which loads parts into RAM at system-start, third-party tools, StyleXP and such - don't wonder if your precious RAM is already used up then, even before you start some applications after logging into Windows.
You might also want to test your RAM. Bootable images for a disk can be downloaded from http://www.memtest86.com. It is no failsafe since software can't detect physical RAM problems, but running it a few hours can greatly help if it still works in a good way or if it needs to be replaced. |