Available physical memory

Hi Everyone,

Two of us are trying to find out why our friends' son's HP is running slow. We have stopped a lot of programs from running at startup and started checking the monitors. We booted up to the desktop and went straight to system information (Win XP Home). Total physical memory = 192MB (onboard graphics); Available physical memory = 16MB. We kept refeshing and found the APM slowly came up to 42MB. Went to Task Manager, it said there were only 40 or maybe 50MB of programs loaded. My friend didn't like the look of Helpctr.exe (13MB) and ended it. APM came up to 82MB.

Can anyone help with what the APM is doing
Does anyone know how to stop Helpctr.exe (microsoft program, part of Help and Support) from starting up?

I am going to take it on the 'net tomorrow and get antispyware and Hijack this. Antivirus is up to date.

Regards to you all,
Matt
PS I am working on the harddrive...cleanup, checkdisk, defrag etc. It seems to be increasing quite a bit in speed, but when you open a program you can actually see the "window" being built. It also slow starting up and shutting down.
Don't say it's probably because it's a HP, I already know that!

 

It is normal for windows XP to use as much physical memory as it can get (up to a limit)
Why would you want to not use physical memory , but force it to use slower virtual memory(Swap file) on the hard drive? It will use as much of the RAM (Physical memory) as possible , ,keeping the most important things there and the less important items off on the swap file.

256MB is really the bottom end for decent XP performance, I would suggest that the best thing to do is to add another stick of RAM.


Standard maintenance helps, uninstall unneeded programs, check for spyware, trojans and viruses. Run disk cleanup and defrag. Clear the prefetch folder .

 

Hi Matt

I'd vote for another 512 MB for a young man who'll use the computer heavily. That should make a noticeable improvement.

 

Hi Fellas,
It went even better today. I took along and tried my stick of 512MB, that did help, so we are going to add 256MB (it almost ran like a real computer ), you can still notice the windows being built, but was a lot faster at startup and shutdown. Something is clogging the harddrive or dragging down the performance in the background. I could not get it connected to the net, I will take antispyware and HJT with me tomorrow on disk. Norton Antivirus found 1 spyware.

With 512MB of RAM installed, Available Physical Memory was still only 190-200MB at the desktop. Something is filling up that RAM.

I remember the discussion on pagefile Christer, it makes more sense to me now that I can see it in WinXP.

Thanks for all the suggestions.
Matt

 

Ghost...Ghost, I wish I could. It is 11Gig of data on C: and a HP "recovery" D: drive (760MB free). I would be too scared to touch it with Partition Magic.
I only have a spare 6Gig harddrive at home.
I would love to Ghost it across to a good, speedy drive and see how it performs on that. The HDD drive LED does not "flash ", it only "blinks "...a lot.

Matt

 

I'm sure you've checked the CPU and memory bus speeds in the BIOS, but thought I'd remind you anyway. Seen a drop there really slow things down.

 

I might have time to check some of those today.

Is there a DMA setting for the HDD in Windows? It's not in the drive properties.

Matt

 

Hi Arie, this computer is really only used for playing music, talking to friends through Messenger and downloading a few bits and pieces. Admittedly it has not been "cleaned up" since they got it. It surprises me how poorly it was running.

I gave it back to them today. It is now running OK, it is throwing windows straight onto the screen. Startup and Shutdown are still not good, but it has been taken off the router for shared ADSL, so I am hoping that it will speed up when it finds the network again.

Spybot found about 5 items, I don't think they were nasty, but speed improved.

I closed about 5 items with HiJackThis, they were internet stuff.

Cleaned out the Prefetch folder.

Last thing was to use Christer's suggested website to stop or disable unneccessary services. I did not get a chance to check the available memory afterwards.

My view of what was happening:
A lot of programs were being loaded at startup, Norton Antivirus and Internet Security, printer, scanner, camera, updating programs, web connections, monitoring programs, etc, etc and etc. First, they had to be loaded into RAM, ouch, out of space. Then they had to farmed out into the pagefile, waiting, waiting, with a HDD that I think may be quite average (a WD, but maybe the cheapest bulk-buy). You could hear the drive heads thrashing about when I started, they were quiet after the cleanup and defrag. It still seems slow accessing the drive.

At the same time things are being loaded, Norton Antivirus wants to start checking files...great! . I would love to disable it from running automatically, but can't on a child's computer. I have educated my sister in how to basically avoid "catching nasties" and set her NAV to manual, for a 400Mhz, frankly, it now runs better than the 2.6Ghz HP (although it ran almost the same before I did). NAV may be good on a nice clean system, but I think it causes a lot of problems once the system starts filling up.

The extra RAM has improved things, but I see it as an excuse to run an overloaded system. Take the 64MB of graphics away from 256MB and it will run XP and some programs...for a while. Start installing...how many programs want to load at startup?? Everything wants to monitor, sit in the system tray or be there when it thinks you may need it. Not many have background installation disabled as default then ask you if you would like to enable it...most don't even ask about disabling it!

My rant for the moment

Much appreciate all the help
Matt

 

Physical Memory:
Total 511 MB
Used 305 MB
Free 205 MB
Utilization 60 %

Swap Space:
Total 1248 MB
Used 264 MB
Free 984 MB
Utilization 21 %

Virtual Memory:
Total 1760 MB
Used 570 MB
Free 1189 MB
Utilization 32 %

Physical Address Extension (PAE):
Supported by Operating System Yes
Supported by CPU Yes






Do not overlook the bios setting for the Aperture for video card.
The 64MB dedicated to it does not show up at all, but there is a second setting for RAM the video card can access / reserve for additonal storage of textures etc. Set to low and graphic intensive applications will crash , set to high and it will bog down the system.
Normally 96-128MB is a good setting.

 

Just a point my friend made as he was looking at the computer. A sticker on the front says "This computer has 256MB of RAM ", another says "This computer has 64MB onboard graphics ". If you were looking at running programs with specifications of 256MB RAM, I suppose you would be very disappointed if you did not know the link between them. In fact, a young fellow at work said he was having trouble with running Warcraft III and could I get some RAM for him. He has an almost identical Compaq computer (256 - 64). I checked the specs, W/CIII asks for 256MB recommended, no wonder he was having trouble. Since I had to get 256MB for the first machine, I got one stick of 512MB and put it into the first machine and added the 256MB to the second. Saved $10 on buying two sticks of 256, so the fellow from work only had to pay $35. He is really pleased.

My friend with the HP rang today and said his son was really pleased with the performance. [I would like to know if it actually runs better than the day they bought it home ]

Smiles all round!
-----------------------------------------------------
oshwyn, not a bad point. If I get to see it again soon I will check the Aperture setting. It can be boosted now that extra RAM is available. I have seen recommendations that it be set to half the total system RAM, but 256MB is unneccessary. I set it to 128MB when enough RAM is available.

Matt