RAM?

Clarifications

Firstly Windows not sees all available RAM but uses it as well. It grabs what's available and then hands out the available RAM to things that need it. Quite often it doesn't get released quickly either so some gets tied up being used for something that has long since gone through the system.

If you bring up the Task Manager you can see in the Performance Tab how much RAM is available how much of the Page File is being used, the amount of CPU Activity and other things like that.

You also need to remember that if you have an On Board Video it will steal some system memory to use as Video Memory as well as CPU Clock Cycles to use to generate the Video so it will slow things down quite a bit over a similar computer with a separate Video Card. So if you don't see that 512 MEG listed remember that there is some being used for the Video.

Now to speed things up you can make sure that you always have at least 20% free space on any partition/HDD and run Defrag regularly to consolidate the Files stored on the HDD.

You also need to look at the number of running processors that your particular machine has running again on the Task Manager and the more that it has running the slower it's going to be because these processes are using Clock Cycles of the CPU and slowing things down because the CPU is being used for things that are not being used.

As Windows doesn't free up Memory as well as it should it's a good idea not to leave any Windows Computer running for days at a time as eventually the RAM will be all allocated and the process involved in reallocating already used RAM will slow the system down even more.

Also you need to look at the amount of L2 Cache on the CPU as the more that there is there the faster the system will appear to run and increasing the system RAM to compensate for a lack of L2 Cache isn't a solution that works all that well.

Over all you need to do some routine maintains on your computer to keep it running at peek performance so you'll need to do everything listed above and also perform regular backup's so you are not up for thousands of $ in the event of a HDD failure where critical Data just has to be recovered.

Col

In the Run box type perfmon.msc. This will bring up the Windows Performance Monitor. Right click on the Counter branch and select new log settings. Give the new log a name and then click the Add button in the new log window. For the Performance Object, select memory and choose the memory attribute you want to monitor. Use the Explain button liberally! This will get you started in determining just what you RAM is busy doing.

You can do this, but if you think your overall system performance has degraded over time, I'd bet it's more of a spyware issue.

Depending on the processor or processors, what with dual cores and all, look to L2 cache to make sure it is maxed out. Next look at system memory and make sure the correct memory for your bus speed is installed. 512 is just on the borderline of being adequate if you are looking for the ultimate in speed 1 meg/processor is much better but to really get up and fly 2 meg per processor is really the way to go; more than this is superfluous and can actually be detrimental to performance in some cases.

You can do as Mambo suggests, its a good point from which to start, or you can go to Downloads.com and check out the utilities for memory monitoring; a lot of them are free and most will let you monitor memory performance from the system tray.

Make sure you have a firewall in place and a good antivirus program. There is much more to antivirus protection than Symantec's Norton or McAfee but you should also be running something like Spybot S & D and AdAware. It might slow your connections down a bit but get into the habit of dumping cookies and history files and clean out the Windows temp file. You should run these little housekeeping chores once or twice a month and after you finish with them then run defrag. You should definitely defrag at least once a month. I would also advise cleaning out your registry but that is not something for the squeamish, unless you have a truly good program, like JV16 Power Tools, for the purpose. I would suggest running that at least twice a year; holding your breath and crossing your fingers is optional.

[b]Dawg[/b] ]:)