Clearing Up Physical Memory?

Liku

<div class="IPBDescription">Computer Question.</div> Ok, I tried playing NS a game of NS yesterday to find my computer going at a whopping 13 FPS. I have Nvidia's Media Center on my Taskbar, when I right Click it and select "About Media Center," it says:
Total Physical Memory Available: 260,400 KB
Free Physical Memory: [Currently]79,840 KB

70 - 90's what my computer has when I first turn the computer on, and I can't get any higher than that. I'm guessing this is my RAM? Because I have 256 RAM and it changed when I changed my RAM. It is the same? And can I clear it some how? After that short attempt at NS, I have 1,000 KB of Free Physical Memory. And lately I've been getting an Alert from the Taskbar saying my Memory's way to low. Any suggestions?

MedHead

What are you running in the background?

There are such things as RAM cleaners, but from what I've heard, they don't work.

Gadzuko

It sounds like you've got far too many things going on startup. Do you virus and adware scan regularly? If you do, go into Start/Run/then type msconfig and hit enter. Poke around in there a bit to see if anything is starting up which shouldn't be. If you <i>don't</i> virus/ad scan regularly, you should.

Liku

Any know of a free and effective Virus Scan?

Ok, I hit up msconfig and clicked the Startup tab.
I have these running at startup:
NvCpl [Don't know what it does]
nwiz [Don't know what it does]
qttask [Don't know what it does]
Logi_MwX [Don't know what it does, my Logitech Mouse Ware I guess]
E_S10IC2 [Don't know what it does]
DirectCD [Don't know what it does]
winampa [Removed]
ybrwicon [Don't know what it does, guessing it's my Yahoo! Browser]
IPMon32 [Don't know what it does]
NVMCTRAY [Don't know what it does]
steam [Want on Startup
StyleXP [Which I don't even have anymore]
Adobe Gamma Loader [Don't know what it does]
Trillian [Want on Startup]

Would removing any of these harm my system?

Gadzuko

I have qttask, nwiz, NvCpl and DirectCD disabled on my computer, and it runs fine. I would vote for removing things like E_S10IC2, but keep NVMCTray, I believe that's a Windows thing. I'm unsure of the Adobe Gamma Loader.

CommunistWithAGun

I think the shear fact you only has 256 mb of ram is doing it. You running XP?

MedHead

NvCpl [nVIDIA drivers]
nwiz [nVIDIA nView Wizard]
qttask [Quicktime Task Manager]
Logi_MwX [More than likely your Logitech drivers]
E_S10IC2 [Epson printer status monitor]
DirectCD [Data CD burning tool]
ybrwicon [More than likely your Yahoo! Browser]
IPMon32 [IP Monitor, more than likely installed with the Yahoo! Browser]
NVMCTRAY [Video card related]
steam [There's your problem]
Adobe Gamma Loader [Monitor gamma adjuster for Adobe graphics products]

Steam <b>eats</b> resources. Probably not best to have it on all the time.

Liku

I'm thinking of removing:
NvCpl [nVIDIA drivers]
nwiz [nVIDIA nView Wizard]
qttask [Quicktime Task Manager]
E_S10IC2 [Epson printer status monitor]
DirectCD [Data CD burning tool]
NVMCTRAY [Video card related]
steam [There's your problem]
Adobe Gamma Loader [Monitor gamma adjuster for Adobe graphics products]

I wouldn't need to fondle with anything if I needed to Print/Burn right? What about those Drivers?

<edit>Yes, only 256 MB of Ram and running XP</edit>

CommunistWithAGun

Im gonna go ahead and blame XP. XP Just needs at least 512 to run well with games. Especially so if its SDRAM. Try to get WIn2k. Very good OS.

weggy

Agreed. Install Win2k. Its more or less XP without the resource hogging crap XP uses.

I would disable, well, just about all of those. The only thing I have running in the background aside from critical windows stuff is my logitech drivers, a popup blocker, and daemon tools.

Go to www.blkviper.com and disable services you dont need. Theyre in administrative tools. It boggles my mind that hardly anyone knows about these. Thatll free up quite a bit of resources, period.

And RAM cleaners do work. Go to www.analogx.com and download maxmem.

DiscoZombie

I gotta disagree with these guys. I mean, yeah, 256 megs is a BIT behind the times, especially for windows xp, but on my previous machine, I was running 128 megs under windows XP and I could even play battlefield 1942...

when I'm outa memory, first thing I do is hit ctrl-alt-delete, go to processes, and sort them in order of memory use... and every high memory use process that you can tell is pointless, end it and try to make sure it doesn't start up again... and if there are processes you don't know about, ask us... or you could just end em and see what happens, and if your computer starts acting funny just restart it, no permanent damage there...

don't quote me on that though, just my limited understanding of it :>

Swiftspear

just close everything in the startup menu, you don't NEED any of it. It cant be that much trouble to double click the trillian and steam icons when you want to use them and it actually save a surprizing amout of ram durnig the ridiculously inefficiant windows startup.

Liku

Thanks guys, I've managed to free up 2 Gigs and I'm currently running with 155MB free. There's still room for improvement, but this is better than ever.

SoulSkorpion

For stuff like Trillian, spyware removers and virus scanners you don't really have the luxury of having enough RAM to just have them open all the time. If you really want to free up memory, close them while you're gaming and open them when you're not.

I've also heard that having a graphic for a wallpaper uses up RAM as well, although I couldn't say how much. If you really, really, really want to squeeze that little bit more RAM out of your machine, switch your wallpaper off.