2GB ram, windows won't use more than 1GB, ever-- mb/chipset problem?

Maezr

Senior member
Jan 20, 2002
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I have 2gb of ram and I frequently multitask like crazy. the ram usage will get right up to 1gb but not pass it, and windows will start using the pagefile

why is this happening?

k8n neo motherboard with 2x ddr400 sticks
 

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
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is the RAM seen in the BIOS? if you run CPU-Z, does the stick show?

That pagefile is being used long before you hit the 1GB mark on physical RAM.
 

Maezr

Senior member
Jan 20, 2002
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the ram is seen in the bios and in windows. don't know what CPU-Z is?

why is the pagefile used when there's free ram, exactly?
 

Seekermeister

Golden Member
Oct 3, 2006
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Run Memtest86. Considering that it is seeing exactly half of the ram, it sounds like one of them has gone bad. If one doesn't test, then remove it and switch the good ram's slot to be sure that there is no problem there.
 

btcomm1

Senior member
Sep 7, 2006
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You can disable your paging file, windows will not create another paging file behind your back like somone said in that thread. What will happen is, IF you run out of real ram you will get an error message saying you have run out of virtual memory and your program will probrably crash, if windows did create a paging file behind your back then it would stop programs from crashing.
 

Maezr

Senior member
Jan 20, 2002
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the commit charge isn't currently too bad, I'll have to check it when under more stress. but it's still floating RIGHT around the 1gb barrier and doesn't seem to use more

yet I still get "windows needs to increase the available virtual memory" messages, when little ram is being used
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
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Originally posted by: btcomm1
You can disable your paging file, windows will not create another paging file behind your back like somone said in that thread. What will happen is, IF you run out of real ram you will get an error message saying you have run out of virtual memory and your program will probrably crash, if windows did create a paging file behind your back then it would stop programs from crashing.

Windows will usually go and create a page file anyway -- but for its own internal use, not for the applications. You end up with the worst of both worlds -- the OS can still page things out to disk if it feels like it, plus you can run out of RAM and crash your apps. Although this can sometimes help with things like the disk cache pushing out memory pages that you'd rather have staying in.

the commit charge isn't currently too bad, I'll have to check it when under more stress. but it's still floating RIGHT around the 1gb barrier and doesn't seem to use more

yet I still get "windows needs to increase the available virtual memory" messages, when little ram is being used

That sounds pretty strange. What is the Commit Charge "limit" value? That should be equal to the amount of physical memory plus the maximum size of your swapfile. And is the amount of physical memory reported correctly in Task Manager?

If you had done any registry or settings tweaks around your virtual memory settings, you might try putting it back to the "let windows manage it" mode.

If your commit charge never goes up over 1GB even when you are sure it should (you can create huge memory usage by running things like Prime95 and setting the max memory usage to something like 1024MB), there may be something wrong with your OS installation or your hardware.
 

Maezr

Senior member
Jan 20, 2002
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http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/5340/ramprobhg9.png

opened a lot of stuff to try to test it out. first time I've seen it use more than 1GB of ram... but still, this is confusing.

ram is free (see physical memory). yet windows continually increases the pagefile size? (look at the graph)

windows starts at 250mb for the pagefile. I set it to something low to see how it'd react. yet it's up to 1.62GB (was even higher)... but the ram's not used.
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
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Originally posted by: Maezr
http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/5340/ramprobhg9.png

opened a lot of stuff to try to test it out. first time I've seen it use more than 1GB of ram... but still, this is confusing.

ram is free (see physical memory). yet windows continually increases the pagefile size? (look at the graph)

windows starts at 250mb for the pagefile. I set it to something low to see how it'd react. yet it's up to 1.62GB (was even higher)... but the ram's not used.

"PF Usage" is not how much data is being paged out to disk, and has nothing to do with how big your swapfile is. Yes, I know, it's badly named. I didn't write it. :p (edit: this field is called "Memory Usage" in Win2K, which IMO is a much better name, since it doesn't confuse the hell out of people like this.)

That looks normal to me. You have ~1.7GB of allocated space, and ~500MB of "unused" physical memory out of 2GB. The "Available" number under "Physical Memory" should drop very close to 0 if you push your memory usage up to or past 2GB.
 

Maezr

Senior member
Jan 20, 2002
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that certainly does make more sense, thanks... can't believe they'd name it that.

still though, I do get those "windows must increase the size of your virtual memory" messages when the memory use is very moderate. why would that be?
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
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Originally posted by: Maezr
that certainly does make more sense, thanks... can't believe they'd name it that.

There is a little bit of logic behind it -- even if your swapfile is disabled, you are still using the virtual memory system, and Windows refers to the main VM space as the "page file" or "paging area". Just saying "memory usage" itself is a little misleading, because then it's not clear if you mean:

1) Physical RAM that is in use (ie, "Total" physical memory minus "Available" physical memory)
2) The portion of the 'real' swap space (on disk) that is in use (not visible in Task Manager, but possibly through Performance Monitor as mentioned in the link above)
3) The amount of 'virtual' space that has been allocated by programs (what XP calls "PF usage")
4) The amount of 'virtual' space that really is actually backed by the pagefile (this is the "commit charge total" and is what people usually mean when they talk about "memory usage")

The whole thing gets very complicated very quickly. Admittedly, Windows does a rather poor job of detailing what is going on.

still though, I do get those "windows must increase the size of your virtual memory" messages when the memory use is very moderate. why would that be?

That I'm less sure about.

Some programs (I know some versions of Photoshop have been known to do this) may try to allocate a large amount of memory at startup, or at other times -- but not for very long. There are also some other things applications can do (such as memory-mapped I/O) that can eat up virtual memory space but don't 'really' take up physical RAM. If you have no swapfile, or a very small swapfile, Windows might 'run out' of memory space, even though the application isn't truly going to use all the space it is asking for.
 

boomerang

Lifer
Jun 19, 2000
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Originally posted by: Maezr
I do get those "windows must increase the size of your virtual memory" messages when the memory use is very moderate. why would that be?
I've seen this mesage with file corruption. The HD developed a bad sector. Running chdsk /r "fixed" it, but the problem persisted. A fresh install to a new HD made the error message go away.

I could have cloned the drive and done a repair install but chose to start over.

I'm sure there may have been a better way to deal with this, but I am far from knowing everything about these newfangled computers. :) I have to work within my scope of knowledge.



 

Maezr

Senior member
Jan 20, 2002
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I don't think anything's corruped. it only happened because I made the swap file as small as it is. if it's the default size it's fine. I'm just disconcerted by the fact it's using swap so much
 

btcomm1

Senior member
Sep 7, 2006
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You could try disabling your Page file completely, if you don't know how to do that, right click on My computer and go to advacned, then click on settings under performace, go to the advanced tab then click change, click no paging file and click set. Then reboot your computer. That will ensure it's not using pagefile.sys at all. If you end up using more the 2 GB of ram I guess you can enable it again.