CPU, Ram and Load and Win

[mikeshn]

My computer has 256 MB of Ram. Sometimes it works very slow, using Virtual Memory but CPU % is very low.
I don't understand why CPU average is pretty low. Why the CPU cannot increase CPU average and than the Virtual Memory will decrease.


I'm confused!

 

[Nothinman]

CPU and swap usage have nothing to do with each other, and Virtual Memory is not the same as swap.

 

[jswjimmy]

try a clean install

 

[mikeshn]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
CPU and swap usage have nothing to do with each other, and Virtual Memory is not the same as swap.

How Virtual Memory different from swap ?

Thanks

 

[Nothinman]

Virtual Memory is the idea that every process has it's own address space, the memory address 0x000000AB is difference for every process because that address is virtual and is only a pointer to the physical address. The only things that can see real, physical addresses are the kernel and the hardware. On a 32-bit system every process has 4G of Virtual Memory no matter how much physical memory is present, usually 2G of that space is reserved for the kernel. Virtual Memory protects processes from other processes and allows for things like demand paging and swapping to disk. Swapping is just the ability to put some memory pages in another location to make room in physical memory, technically I could swap out to the network, tape, cdrw, etc it doesn't matter as long as I have a kernel system that can read/write memory pages to that location.