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#159055 18th Jun 2007 11:47pm
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BMW Joe Offline OP
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I'm intregued by your sig Matty.

I have same processor (only mines 3.2) and version of XP as you, and I have a gig of RAM, and yet after running for, and I quote, 7 hours, 48 mins, hardly running any apps or services, its used 514mb of RAM, and yet yours has been on 6 days 7 hours and its only used 251mb!

How do you cope with such little memory? lol


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BMW Joe #159057 18th Jun 2007 11:59pm
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Ive totally mashed this version of windows, played about with everything to try and keep memory leakage low.

I am surprised its still running so sweet tbh though as I have had CS3 running quite a few times in the last few days and that usually inspires memory to leak lol.

Ive only got about 7 tabs in IE7 open, Outlook Express, MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Winamp 2.91 and a few folders open atm, but the memory is kinda weird today, sometimes its as low as 199MB other times its as high as 280MB when using these core apps.

Its the main reason I wont upgrade to Vista - NT5 and previous can be tweaked to fook to use hardly any RAM (i think mine uses ~57MB at startup), id rather the memory went to apps then the OS (Vista will eat almost a gig before you even loaded IE7 sometimes).

I have a P3 850Mhz/512MB and I suppose I learnt a lot of tweaking on that, it is running sweet as well, the longest I have had that machine on with XP was around 14 days, but with 2000 I once had it on for 26 days a few years back lol. The XP OS on that system has been installed for over 5 years and still got no problems, runs like a dream.

One thing is though, I dont think this sig thing reports swap memory usage, so it could actually be higher then what its reporting, but of course not in system RAM.

I used to have 1GB, but 512MB died on me, and it was stuff I had added so Acer wouldnt cover it on the insurance. Ive never got more cos it keeps going up in price and cant justify the cost atm as I very rarely need more then 450MB.

The funny thing is this system is a laptop, so its just proving people wrong who say you cant leave a laptop on for too long or it overheats, i mean CPU's dont come much hotter then the Northwood P4 at 3.0Ghz/800Mhz lol.

Of course theres only so much one can do to keep the system running sweet, and in light of the new sig I will see how long I can keep it running for lol. Its not running slow in the slightest yet (CS3 still loads up in seconds and IE is having no probs browsing), so I will say it has at least another few days left in it yet.

BTW, theres no Antivirus or software firewall running on the bitch (well there is Windows Firewall), that may be helping??

smile

MattLFC #159058 19th Jun 2007 12:14am
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BMW Joe Offline OP
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probably, I use AVG (which has quite a few services and processes) and Zonealarm.

Bloody amazin spec for a lappy that - just shows you!

are you running XP visual effects for performance and not appearence?

Is your memory usage set to programs or system cache?


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BMW Joe #159059 19th Jun 2007 12:28am
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Aye Zonealarm can sometimes be a bit too heavy on memory and CPU, thats why I dont run it (or any firewall software except windows firewall).

AVG is usually quite sweet but can be a bit mem intensive on occasion.

Visual Effects is set to custom ("show shadows under menus", "show window contents while dragging", "smooth edges of screen fonts", and the bottom 3 are the only options turned on).

Using the stadard XP theme, sometimes people drop themes altogether to save RAM, i used to but it dont actually make too much difference tbh.

Both CPU scheduling and Memory Usage is set to programs and the system has 768MB of swap assigned to it.

The CPU has HT turned on, which is good when running newer apps like IE7, CS3 etc, but if ya running older apps its not so good.

Aye the laptop was top end at the time i bought it (mid-2004), has the P4 of course, 512MB, 60GB (now upgraded to a 120GB though) DVDR/RW+/-/DL and a 128MB ATi Mobility Radeon 9700 (which takes the strain off the CPU and memory that many laptops suffer from cos of their integrated crap lol).

It was only about £800 when I bought it (a bargain at the time), I wanted a desktop replacement (basically all the power of a desktop but in a laptop - mainly to stop me from spending stupid amounts of money [~£300 a month] constantly upgrading my old desktop) it was a choice between the P4 or an AMD Athlon 64 at the time so I went for the P4 as its best for encoding audio/video, has HT which i knew would become better and better as apps began making use of it and also because I like the raw power of the P4. Also, the Athlon had a WXGA screen, and I wanted an XGA+ lol.

Its nothing special nowadays of course, its 3 years old, but it does me fine, its probably faster then what I need to be honest, so long as it runs all me business apps and the likes of CS3 fine im not bothered hehe.

Ive grown out of my overclocking and gaming days, the gaming days were already numbered before I bought the laptop (thanks to the Radeon the laptops no slouch at gaming, but I just have no interest in it anymore), the overclocking days got killed off by it lmao!

smile

MattLFC #159060 19th Jun 2007 12:49am
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Oh I also have the likes of disk indexing and system restore turned off - they are nigh on useless imho, but waste resources as they constantly monitor changes on your system.

I only have the bare essential services turned on to run the net basically, and themes, I think Windows Installer is turned on atm cos I needed it to install Safari, but other then that everything is disabled.

smile

MattLFC #159079 19th Jun 2007 11:50am
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BMW Joe Offline OP
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Originally Posted by MattyC
The CPU has HT turned on, which is good when running newer apps like IE7, CS3 etc, but if ya running older apps its not so good.


Think I might have to do that with mine. Is it in the BIOS? An is it off by default?


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BMW Joe #159082 19th Jun 2007 12:21pm
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It depends who the manufacturer is. The easiest way to find out is to open up task manager and check is the CPU usage monitor displays one or two CPU's.

1x CPU = HT is off
2x CPU = HT is on

smile

MattLFC #159107 19th Jun 2007 3:51pm
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BMW Joe Offline OP
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well, me thinks i turned it off cas it used to, but now I only have one?? lol


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BMW Joe #159109 19th Jun 2007 3:53pm
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Ye can enable it in the BIOS fella.

smile

MattLFC #159752 22nd Jun 2007 4:30pm
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10 days now and still running sweet. Was a bit worried the other day, seemed to have a few minutes where it slowed down, thought it was in need of a reboot, but it went back to running fine again not longer after.

Still loading up CS3 quite fast and having no problems multitasking (also should add that I have been running Ubuntu Linux in Virtual PC 2007 on it as well yesterday and the day before), so I rekon theres plenty of life in it yet!

Im aiming for 21 days atm, looking good for it so far

smile

MattLFC #160047 23rd Jun 2007 6:04pm
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Well nearly 11 days, but its having problems atm, it is stalling randomly for a split second every now and again.

Im not sure why at this point, but I did bend the wifi card this morning by accident, and I am not sure if it is related to that.

So im gonna try my spare wifi card when i cba installing it lol.

MattLFC #160137 24th Jun 2007 1:26am
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well, it seems the problems were down to the bent wifi card, put me spare one in a few hours back and its been rock solid since.

smile

#160156 24th Jun 2007 10:05am
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BMW Joe Offline OP
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Er..yeah, sure its simpler to have 2 gig of ram, but thats only if your existing hardware supports it.

For those of us who don't have that much money to buy a top of the range comp every 12 months or so, we have to try and use what we've got and adjust software to help.

Also, laptops are difficult to expand (hardware wise) due to physical space and compatability issues with standard desktop hardware.


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#160164 24th Jun 2007 12:43pm
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It is simple to have 2GB memory, your right. However, this doesnt help your system in the long run - unless you keep a control of what memory is being used where, and you keep the usage by Windows down, you will find even 4GB will become bogged down in hours.

Windows "leaks" memory, this something that has always happened due to the openess of the windows code, and something that will probably always happen in the future.

The real problem starts when it starts leaking to the swap (thats actually a Linux term, so as know in windows systems, the virtual memory). Its okay and quite acceptable for Windows to use a considerable amount of swap, due to the way it handles the commit charge (in Linux its different, if its using swap, there something running that shouldnt be). But once it starts leaking on the swap, you will find the system will become slower and slower due to the fact the hard drive IO is then crippled.

Now some people say, when you have 4GB of RAM, turn off the swap, but when you do this, it can have counter effects, not only can it cause system instability, but Windows likes to have adecent swap in the background just for its own comfort, some things are best left running in swap.

Tbh, if we were all running SCSI (especially on the Ultra360 interface), it wouldnt be so much of a problem, but the limitations of IDE can cripple windows over time (ie. SCSI can read and write at the same time, IDE cant, SCSI has a much wider bandwidth and more responsive IO).

These are some of the reasons Joe is surprised I have had this laptop running for nearly 12 days, because on 99.9% of Windows systems, they start running slow after a couple days, sometimes even a few hours, and need a reboot.

My laptop can take upto 4GB (i had 1GB until a memory module died), but as you can see from my strictly controlled memory usage in my sig, it isnt required, the highest I ever use really is around the 450MB level, its usually around the 250MB level.

So having an overhead of 1.7GB wouldnt help things or make things run smoother/faster.

smile

MattLFC #160171 24th Jun 2007 3:02pm
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I'll be definately be making sure that my computers clear of unwanted items. Its got quite alot of things on it but its what's useful to me now and again. I've have mine running for about 32 hours before and its been alrite with the odd moments of signs showing slowness when i load more then one progam then usual but then it comes back to being normal again so it seems like its all going well.

Should of seen my old pc with the specs of:

Windows 98 (Upgraded to Xp but then downgraded to Windows ME now)
Pentium 3, 600MHz clock speed raftl
191mb of RAM loool
Standard graphics card
20Gb of Harddrive.

You just cudnt load more then 2 applications on that.

Believe it or not that pc spec costs £900+ back in 8-9 years ago and its priceless in this day and age! So the things we pay now we may think its gd but another 8-9 years the specs prob are priceless.

Originally Posted by MattyC
But once it starts leaking on the swap, you will find the system will become slower and slower due to the fact the hard drive IO is then crippled.


How would you deal with this kind of problem then if the system starts to become slower and slower?
Just asking as it might help some people who are experiencing this effect on their computer.

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