Desktop

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Physical Memory in Windows XP

0 helpful
7 replies

by jchabtraining 1 view

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.
In System Information it lists 256mb for my total physical memory and 79.77 as my available physical memory. Why the difference? Is this the same as system resources in Win98? I have a customer who is running WinXP and their machine is running very slow, we've checked for virus, cleaned up the disk (all that that entails to run maintenance on it)and they have listed 128mb memory but only 12mb available memory.

7 replies

by joseph moore

There is Total Physical Memory, and Available Physical Memory.
The Total is the total amount physically installed in the machine. So, if your computer has a 128 MB RAM chip installed, then your Total Physical Memory is, as you would have guessed, 128 MB.
The Available is the amount of the physical memory that is NOT being used at the moment.
So, if your client has 128 MB RAM Total Physical Memory, but only 12 MB Available, then their computer is running multiple processes that are using 116 MB of the RAM.
Yep, that is a lot!
Like Answer1 said, open up Task Manager, click on the Processes tab, and you will see each process that is running, along with the memory used.
If they have a lot of icons by the clock, then all of those are processes, taking up memory and CPU clock cycles.

by sit0nmyfase

Did you enter MSCONFIG and clear out what you do not need running in the startup. Another thing to remember XP minimal requirements are 64MB of RAM but it wants 128MB. IMO, Any computer with less then 256MB of memory using WinXP isnt going to have much memory free for applications. Try going to Start>Run>MSCONFIG first and clearing out some programs from the startup(if your not exactly sure what it is then disable it by itself first, if windows works correctly it wasnt needed :D )

This discussion is closed to new replies.