a system-under-load utility?

I was asked to look at a P4 1300 Mhz, Win98se, 128 mb RDRam which was constantly crashing. This began shortly after the owner put AOL 8.0 with all the bells and whistles on the machine. I tried eliminating all the TSRs, cleaning out all variety of temp files and getting the system resources freed up every way I knew how. This sort of worked here and there, but without any real consistency. the machine was never really stable under any kind of multi-tasking, and the owner complained that it never used to be this slow.

Finally, we saw, through AOL’s System Information screen, that the 128 mb of ram was maxed at 100% load. This explained all the symptoms we were having; we went out and got more memory and now everything has breathing room, about 63% load on the ram with AOL running. Things are working very nicely again.

My question is, Is there some kind of utility I can download that does what AOL’s system info program does? AOL’s system info also gives a reading on the percentage of system resources free, just like the performance tab does under Windows’ system properties. I do depend on that reading a lot as a Win9x health barometer. But I’m looking for something that can give me a read on what kind of demand is being made on the ram memory while the system is under load; and maybe other useful information as a bonus? That was so helpful to see, and it immediately identified the problem.

I don’t know of any source in Windows 9x that gives this kind of specific information. Does anyone know of any other utility that gives this kind of information while a system is running?

TIA ! -maureen

 

Hi mauren. AIDA32 "might" do what you want. Under the Motherboard>Memory-Physical Memory section it will show the percentage of RAM in use. It looks like it is dynamic it changes while the program is running.

Lots of other info in AIDA32 that you might be able to use as well.

Download and install the Enterprise Edition. It's freeware.

 

WOW, this is one great little utility! What an incredible amount of information! Under the memory section, I am able to see how much ram I have, how much is in use, how much is free, and what that percentage of load is. It is a delight to actually see the identification of each memory module, the manufacturer, whether it’s pc133, pc2100, etc. I’ve always had to open up the machine and take the memory out to identify what’s running on the motherboard. Identification of chipsets, CPU and its clock speed, motherboard, bios, software, device ID, and it actually has popups over some of the devices with links to the manufacturer’s website in the popup. etc etc etc! and it’s free. Oh my gosh, I couldn’t have hoped for a better response.

THANKS so much John B!!

 

You're welcome. Thanks for posting back.