The case of the missing Ram?

[Mark Young]

I was just browsing through my pc via Norton Systemworks, when I came across this picture.

I have 512Mb of Kingstone 333Mhz Ram. Now the total Physical memory is 480Mb, the available is 254Mb, so where is the rest of it?
I know that windows XP (the OS I am using atm) uses about 124Mb but I dont know why it says an unusual number like 480Mb or why only 254Mb is available when there should be more.

Can anyone offer some advice? Thanks.

 

[funxus]

I don't know what's wrong, but another program you can use to is the built-in task manager. In XP, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete, or write "taskman" in run, to open it.

Here you can see all processes (and the amount of memory needed for each of them), and under performance you can see how much Physical memory you have totally, and how much is available. The available memory varies with the amount of processes running. Just to have another source...

 

[DaEezT]

Originally posted by Sir Eric
I was just browsing through my pc via Norton Systemworks, when I came across this picture.

I have 512Mb of Kingstone 333Mhz Ram. Now the total Physical memory is 480Mb [...]

seems like you have a motherboard with an on-board graphics chip which uses 32 meg of your RAM as "shared" memory.

Originally posted by Sir Eric
[...] why only 254Mb is available when there should be more.
Can anyone offer some advice? Thanks.

226 MB used by windows + apps isnt really special, my windows xp machine currently uses 291 MB.

But don't be fooled by those numbers. Just because that memory is currently being used doesn't mean windows won't automatically free it when it's needed. Lots of useless info (e.g. cached icons) are stored in mem until something more important comes along.
well, at least thats what linux does

 

[Mark Young]

Originally posted by DaEezT


seems like you have a motherboard with an on-board graphics chip which uses 32 meg of your RAM as "shared" memory.

Yes I do. I have an MSI motherboard with intergrated g-force-mmx graphics. It seems obvious now that you have done the maths.

Thanks everyone for repyling,

 

[Aphex_Twin]

That's quite fascinating. I think sometimes in the future beggers will say: "Do you have some spare bytes"?