Can Windows Swallow?

as said windows can use about 100mb on a fresh install, my P4 took up 96mb on a fresh windows install, but it can depend highly on what drivers you have on. these days drivers seem to be becomming bloatware and can use up around 20mb or more which is quite high, so with all your drivers installed and a fresh xp you could be looking at about 150-200mb used just starting up.

a few of ways to keep it down.

1. Stop all services from starting up that you dont use or wont need, you can find some guides around the net.
2. Keep your fonts directory clean of crap fonts windows doesnt use and what you dont use. On startup all your fonts are loaded into memory, i removed about 50 fonts and gained about 20-30mb in free memory.
3. Stop stupid and pointless programs from starting up with windows, for example,
-quickstarts which arent actually any quicker, programs run fine without these.
-Useless background programs and tray icons for drivers, these can suck up space, even tho they are small programs they can load a few dll files which do start taking up a fair bit of memory.

and most of all, keep your system spyware and adware free!

Use nLite, it can really minimize the ram usage.

Click to expand...

Minimizing ram usage means caching more to disk. If you have only less
memory build in more important things will get cached with such tools,
resulting in having heavy disc usage and slowing down everything.

One thing that might help is get a good defrag tool and check if your
mft and your paging file isn´t fragmented badly. And best is to set
your min and max size of paging file to a fixed value e.g. 1024MB min and max
because then there will be no resize (resizing the paging file slows down a
lot).

I wonder why a casual to semi-hardcore PC user would install more than 1Gb of ram.

Click to expand...

Casual gamers won´t need much more (at the moment ) but if you
have many services running you´ll need it (or if you do a lot of 3d rendering,
videoediting, etc etc). My avg mem usage is ~600 MB when no game is
opened

My page file usage is below 15 MB and I clean up my PC from time to time

Click to expand...

Clean up is a good thing, as for the page file size see my comment above.
BTW there are games that need a minimum size of page file to start
(don´t ask me why). If you set your page file size to phys. build in RAM or
twice it´s size it should run fine, as WinXP is slight worser in caching than
2k I would not worry configuring such "huge" page files as both OSes
can handle cache very well and really do only cach the things out of
your RAM that are not always used. Too small page files result in
speed decrease because it always tries to cache out unused things
of your page file and if the page file is too small it buffers some data
back to memory and so on and so on so you will get a lot more of buffer
accesses.
If you want to know more why misconfigured page files will break down
your system performance you can search infos about timings of L2 Cache,
Memory and HDD timings and how they work together, you´ll see how
caching too often will break down a lot of your CPU power.

For the guys with 1 GB and more RAM you should try disabling caching
Kernel to disc, this will not increase game performance or such things
but applications will start faster

I Hope you´ll manage a way to get your system to a clean fast multitask
switching

What are you talking about? nLite is not a "ram cleaner" or whatever those tools are called...

Click to expand...

Sorry Normally people mean caching tools when they talk about minimizing memory.
I didn´t know this tool as I never needed one, all my computers since 1996 have a
minimum of 1 GB X)

As for cache tools, I wouldn´t use any of them if you use XP/2k
or higher as the OS does manage RAM very good (if you don´t have bad applications
that don´t register/free up their used RAM correctly). I tested a lot of them just
for fun, none of the tools speeded up anything no matter if I was rendering 3D things,
running an emu, doing some database things or playing a game.

BTW if your drivers are eating up much of your system you could try using different
hardware profiles e.g. one with already all unused hw disabled and one with all the
drivers and hw enabled so you can switch via boot to the setup you just need

Do you seriously belive that WindowsXP can manage system resources well without tweaking?

Click to expand...

Yes as it wont cache 50GB even if you set your page file to that size
But as I already said 2k´s memory management is slightly better as XP´s ,
all my computers are running 2k 24h/7d only rebooting if it´s really needed
(driver changes, hardware replacement, ...) and I never had any problems
with memory.

Although it does a better job than Windows9x it still needs alot of tweaking for it to manage RAM properly

Click to expand...

Hmm never needed any tool but I´m not using XP perhaps that´s the point
I know a lot people who had to reboot from time to time as XP didn´t free up the
unused memory correctly

I'll try disabling caching disabling caching from the same screen used to decide on paging file size

Click to expand...

If you mean to disable caching to disk totally then good luck I tried this and it
didn´t work (with 2k, never tried under 98 as it can only 512 MB of RAM) and there
are still some games out that won´t start without having page file set to a minimum
size (don´t ask me why, perhaps the programmers took some not so illegal stuff while
coding )
Let me know if it worked for you

And if you disable caching of XP/2k Kernel there will still be around up to 90 MB that
are cached (at my system kernel is currently 344 MB with 85 MB cached to disk with
291763 handles and 490 threads opened)

As I already wrote check your page file if its fragmented (2 fragments are ok), a
heavily fragmented MFT and/or page file will slow your system down like hell.
Another thing to speed up your caching is if your page file is not on the same
hard disk like your system, at best on a raid 0