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>512MB needed for non-gaming use?

post #1 of 20
8/21/05 at 9:29am
Thread Starter 
Hey everyone,

I've noticed that when I'm not doing any gaming on my i9300 (i.e. just Windows applications), my PEAK Win XP commit charge size (my total RAM+virtual memory usage, right? but it doesn't seem to add up, exactly...) never seems to go above 400+ MB, even when I've had like 8 firefox windows open with 40 tabs total. I have 512MB of system RAM in my i9300. Does this mean that I wouldn't notice performance improvements with 1.25GB of RAM in things outside of gaming, such as Windows boot-up times, hibernate times (would that probably get worse?), and general Windows application performance and responsiveness?

Right now, according to task manager, I have about 145MB of free RAM, which means about 365MB of RAM is being used (right?). Hmm, my commit charge is currently at 350MB... does that mean that everything should be in my RAM and not in my virtual memory? But I do experience some HD swapping usually, I think.
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post #2 of 20
8/21/05 at 10:44am
I guess it's really up to you. If you feel that your computer is fine with "just" 512MB RAM, then that means you don't need any more RAM. As long as there aren't any unexpected stutter, then it looks like to me you only need 512MB.

Quote:
Right now, according to task manager, I have about 145MB of free RAM, which means about 365MB of RAM is being used (right?). Hmm, my commit charge is currently at 350MB... does that mean that everything should be in my RAM and not in my virtual memory? But I do experience some HD swapping usually, I think.
I'm no expert, but there shouldn't really be any need for your computer to use the paging file since you're not even filling up the RAM. Is there a short stutter or pause in any of your applications when there's "HD swapping"? If not, then the HD swapping is probably not the swapping of the paging file, but just hard drive movement when your computer is accessing a certain file/folder.
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post #3 of 20
8/21/05 at 11:01am
Honestly you should be fine. I have 5 PC's in my house two for my kids one for my wife all have 512meg, and its more than enough for what they do. My son even plays Unreal 2004 with 512meg.

My 9300 has 2 gig mostly for Virtual PC 2004 and the only game I play Bf2. My windows 2003 server has 1gig because its running Exchange 2003 as well.
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post #4 of 20
8/21/05 at 11:37am
More RAM is only needed for computers that use it. Desktop machines won't use more then 512MB unless they're doing some heavy image editing etc. Note that 400MB on the desktop is still alot, have you cleaned house lately? Check out the Koroush's XP Tweaking Guide to clean things up.
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post #5 of 20
8/21/05 at 11:55am
i used to have 512 on my desktop. i upgraded to 1 gig and my page file shot down, which in turn made my system feel faster, unless its all in my head.
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post #6 of 20
8/21/05 at 12:04pm
If your using 400mb on a regular basis I'd suggest increasing it with another 256mb or to 1g. This because at 400mb ram usage you'll find the drive does a lot of paging/swapping which slows the system down (yes even if its not noticable). I always use the rule that I need twice the ram as what the system uses EXCEPT where gaming is concerned You will find the system runs more smooth, have less paging and the drive will last a bit longer. Hope this helps!
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post #7 of 20
8/21/05 at 2:48pm
Yeah, I'm using 700 MB with a bunch of taskbar programs (which I keep for convenience on my non-gaming XP login), Azureus (BitTorrent client), and two Firefox windows with a few tabs each. I'd say 1 GB is minimum these days, even for non-gaming.
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post #8 of 20
8/21/05 at 4:48pm
Actually you can run a perfectly fast internet browsing/e-mail/desktop apps machine with 256MB. My bros laptop only has that and his runs very quickly, it's just a matter of cleaning house and optimizing your system.
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post #9 of 20
8/21/05 at 5:19pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. K6
Actually you can run a perfectly fast internet browsing/e-mail/desktop apps machine with 256MB. My bros laptop only has that and his runs very quickly, it's just a matter of cleaning house and optimizing your system.
Although your bro may be happy with his laptop's speed, I HIGHLY recommend at least 512MB of ram on any Windows XP machine. I gaurantee he would notice faster loading apps and less hard drive accessing if he added another stick of 256.

Last week I ordered my girlfriend an Inspiron 700m, it came with 256MB which REALLY slowed down the machine. Soon as I popped a stick of 512MB the laptop started running MUCH better. Since this isn't a gaming rig I figured 768MB would be plenty.

I work in the IT field and would be hard pressed to say your Windows XP computer will run fine with 256MB. In my honest opinion 512 is the least I could comfortably get away with.
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post #10 of 20
8/21/05 at 5:36pm
It depends a lot on what apps you run. I use photoshop a lot so I regularly use more mem while not gaming than I do while gaming.

For basic word processing, email and web browsing 512mb should be a comfortable amount, I wouldn't recommend using 256mb since Windows XP can eat most of that itself, especially if you haven't tweaked the services and there is nothing worse than trying to use a comp that is paging parts of the OS (worst experience I've ever had using a comp was trying to sort an old comp for a friend that was running windows 2k with norton 2004 and zone alarm and several other apps on 64mb of ram - the HD would never stop thrashing from bootup till shutdown, there was always something trying to juggle its way into ram)
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post #11 of 20
8/21/05 at 6:37pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ZippoMan
Last week I ordered my girlfriend an Inspiron 700m, it came with 256MB which REALLY slowed down the machine. Soon as I popped a stick of 512MB the laptop started running MUCH better. Since this isn't a gaming rig I figured 768MB would be plenty
That's because all of Dell's programs can slow a comp down worse than spyware . I'm a tech too, I build all kinds of systems part-time. 128MB for Windows XP is possible too, but it's severely limited to IE browsing and E-mail. 256 on the other hand, is fine, after boot up his system uses 104MB of memory (even with wireless), leaving 152MB left, more than enough. Like I said, it all depends on how much you tweak
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post #12 of 20
8/21/05 at 7:02pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. K6
That's because all of Dell's programs can slow a comp down worse than spyware . I'm a tech too, I build all kinds of systems part-time. 128MB for Windows XP is possible too, but it's severely limited to IE browsing and E-mail. 256 on the other hand, is fine, after boot up his system uses 104MB of memory (even with wireless), leaving 152MB left, more than enough. Like I said, it all depends on how much you tweak
I agree but for an average user who is not up to tweaking the services etc 256mb isn't likely to be enough so I would recommend at least 512mb to most people, especially since Dell often have double memory deals on so there isn't really any extra cost.
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post #13 of 20
8/21/05 at 8:06pm
Thread Starter 
Yeah, I would agree that 512MB is a minimum for general Windows XP usage, including web browsing and stuff. Right now, Firefox is taking up about 58MB of physical memory, and I only have 3 windows open with, say, 10 tabs total. Sometimes Firefox takes up to 150MB of RAM. Anyways, right now, my page file is sitting at 388MB with about 322MB of physical memory being used, which would mean about 66MB of virtual memory being used on the HD, which isn't too bad. Yesterday, when I started this thread, I was getting this weird reading where I seemed to have 365MB of physical RAM in use (total - available RAM), but my page file was only 350MB big. Phantom RAM usage?

Anyways, I'm planning on getting a 1GB stick of RAM for a total of 1.25GB, because I DO game (BF2 demo, America's Army, etc.), and some things take FOREVER to load and ALT+tabbing to the desktop is painful (I like to listen to online radio broadcasts in WMP while I play a game). Oh yeah, and on a side note, Firefox has this tendency on both my previous desktop and now my i9300 to sometimes suck up 99% CPU or 75% if you have a particular tab that has a Flash heavy page on it, or something, even when it's minimized. It can drag your gaming performance down Quite subtle, too.
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post #14 of 20
8/21/05 at 11:04pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jacmert
Anyways, I'm planning on getting a 1GB stick of RAM for a total of 1.25GB, because I DO game (BF2 demo, America's Army, etc.), and some things take FOREVER to load and ALT+tabbing to the desktop is painful (I like to listen to online radio broadcasts in WMP while I play a game). Oh yeah, and on a side note, Firefox has this tendency on both my previous desktop and now my i9300 to sometimes suck up 99% CPU or 75% if you have a particular tab that has a Flash heavy page on it, or something, even when it's minimized. It can drag your gaming performance down Quite subtle, too.
Good call on the extra RAM and I have the same issue with firefox too; I have no idea why it does that nor what a solution is, but I really haven't looked into it.

And I'd have to agree with 512MB for the average user, however, somehow, these people need to be made aware...
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post #15 of 20
8/22/05 at 12:40am
Mr. K6
The reason Flash and Java pages can use up 80 to 99% of CPU is because they are not server side applications. Both java and flash are required on your pc for these to work and each time you use them it uses resources on your pc. CGI and Perl pages ARE server side applications which use a lot of resources on the web server and very little on your pc.

The reason you see firefox, mozilla and netscape using alot of RAM from time to time is due to memory leaks in the browser. Netscape suffered from this for years and still does. The same problem has found its way into firefox also now. You'll see this when you have a browser opened for awhile. After a few days (shorter at times) you'll find it eats into your ram.

How this helps
edit.. the memory leak can be resolved by simply closing the browser. Using a 3rd party app like Memturbo to restore used mamory is also good. Cheers!
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post #16 of 20
8/22/05 at 1:14am
I knew about the memory leaks, quite apparent at times too. However, an offered solution beyond closing it is to limit the amount of RAM available to firefox. I forget where it is in the config list but google it and I'm sure you'll find it.

But that's interesting about flash and java, it really takes that much horsepower to run those graphics? Seems ludicrous, as there is a very noticable pause in the browser, doesn't seem like it hits IE as bad though. Really too bad for firefox, it's and otherwise perfect browser except for those two issues
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post #17 of 20
8/22/05 at 4:13am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. K6
I knew about the memory leaks, quite apparent at times too. However, an offered solution beyond closing it is to limit the amount of RAM available to firefox. I forget where it is in the config list but google it and I'm sure you'll find it.

But that's interesting about flash and java, it really takes that much horsepower to run those graphics? Seems ludicrous, as there is a very noticable pause in the browser, doesn't seem like it hits IE as bad though. Really too bad for firefox, it's and otherwise perfect browser except for those two issues
It makes no difference if you are using Firefox or IE when it comes to flash files. The cpu use is the same either way. I've noticed for a long time that the flash plugin seems to be very inefficient with cpu use, it can happily use up a large chunk of your cpu while simply displaying a static flash menu which makes no sense at all and seems like sloppy coding to me.
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post #18 of 20
8/23/05 at 9:22pm
Thread Starter 
I don't have a problem with the large amounts of RAM that Firefox uses; I think it's kind of reasonable, considering how much stuff I actually have open (I have like 19 tabs open right now, which basically means 19 webpages). Hmm, 100MB of RAM usage that it's at currently DOES seem kind of high, though. But my REAL problem is when Firefox tries to gobble up CPU utilization, even when I have everything minimized and/or the "culprit" isn't even an active tab.
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post #19 of 20
8/24/05 at 8:25am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jacmert
I don't have a problem with the large amounts of RAM that Firefox uses; I think it's kind of reasonable, considering how much stuff I actually have open (I have like 19 tabs open right now, which basically means 19 webpages). Hmm, 100MB of RAM usage that it's at currently DOES seem kind of high, though. But my REAL problem is when Firefox tries to gobble up CPU utilization, even when I have everything minimized and/or the "culprit" isn't even an active tab.
Minimising makes no difference if you have a page open with flash used (which is pretty much every page thanks to flash adverts) and IE is no different, the problem lies with flash being inefficient and badly designed.
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post #20 of 20
8/24/05 at 11:02am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hiryuu
Minimising makes no difference if you have a page open with flash used (which is pretty much every page thanks to flash adverts) and IE is no different, the problem lies with flash being inefficient and badly designed.
And yet everyone still uses it. I wonder why most sites don't use shockwave instead?
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