Conserving and managing memory usage

[kendall.a]

I totally agree about the thumb drives. A couple of them and you have almost as much disk space as your entire laptop hard drive....

It is hard of course to know what it is doing as it is all but invisible when it is going.

That's the beauty of CleanMem. In a shameless plug, if you haven't read my article on it, you might want to check it out:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best...-optimizer.htm

The developer, Shane, is a frequent visitor to this site and is very open to questions and discussions.

If you are a gluten for punishment, or if you just like to learn, I encourage you to read "About CleanMem" here:

http://www.pcwintech.com/about-cleanmem

It explains a lot on how it works.

[Sope]

Originally Posted by samcraw

@Sope, I simply doubled the paging size. It was 750 and I upped it to 1500. I am not altogether what I am changing because the paging size is kinda confusing to me, but it seems to have worked so far.

1500MB may well be enough considering you have 3GB of RAM.
I would suggest upping it to 3000MB next time if you get any further critical memory warnings.

Originally Posted by samcraw

As for the thumb/flash/ whatever people call it/ drive they come as high as 32 at least that is what I have seen. Given that I can catch them on markdown frequently, I may decided to us that rather than ann external drive as it is infinitely portable, and a pocket full of them will take along almost anything I want.

Thumb drives may indeed suit you best depending on how much data you want to store. However, if you are thinking of buying a number of them to meet your needs it's still worth checking how much it's going to cost you per GB.
Here in the UK it works out approx £1/GB for thumb drives compared to £1/10GB for portable external drives.
Added to that, the external drive is likely to be much faster and last longer, not to mention being more versatile.
Granted they are more bulky, but are still impressively small in the 2.5in form.

[samcraw]

I hated homework in school. But it seems that I am still having to do it.. checking out articles, hardware possibilities, and all that.

But since it all comes to some useful end-- unlike most of the calculus and physics I did-- I have good incentive to do the legwork to find out what is the best (or at least the better) choice.

All again you have my thanks and appreciation.

Sam

[oblivion]

Just as a small further suggestion -- you might also examine anything else that's running on your computer, in case there are some issues there. Try the free version of Winpatrol ( http://www.winpatrol.com/ ) to see (and potentially tweak) what's being loaded at startup, what's running, and even to get clues about other possible bad guys wandering about the place.

You should definitely increase the pagefile to 4.5Gb.

The pagefile is where Windows puts stuff that's technically in RAM but isn't needed right now. So it's "virtual" memory -- because it's on disk -- but you can regard it as an extension, albeit a slow one, to genuine RAM -- within limits. WIndows CAN'T make use of more pagefile than the 1.5x RAM limit, so you won't gain anything setting it beyond that limit but Windows really is happiest when you let it manage it itself.

(Ideally, for best performance, the pagefile should be a single, contiguous area of disk, but achieving that can be a complex struggle so I won't make any further suggestions on that front!)

[The_Blode]

Just further to what everyone else has contributed, you could try tweaking Windows services to achieve better performance. Review the tips @ http://www.blackviper.com/

Also, you could running fewer programs whilst doing memory intensive tasks.

Hope this helps,

Blode.