Tips on freeing up more physical memory

[Medicated858]

Okay, I am a noobie when it comes to things like this. I have a gig of ram and it Norton says that I only have 800 free mb of physical memory. I was wondering whether this adversely affects my performance in MMO games like Planetside. Are there anyways to free up more memory. Also, what is a pagefile? Any help or links would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Shalmanese]

The whole point of RAM is so that you dont HAVE to have a page file. Any amount of free memory greater than 0 is good. Ideally, you want it so that your worst case scenario in terms of memory usage fill up your memory entirely.

 

[Biggs]

Start -> Run -> MSCONFIG
Then uncheck all the programs you don't need. Exercise a bit of caution though, as you might accidentally disable an "essential" program. Anyway, you can always re-enable it if something suddenly acts up.

 

[MDE]

If you have a gig of RAM, you should be fine, but it sounds like you have quite a few background programs running. Close anything you aren't using and that should help a ton. Go through MSCONFIG like Biggs described, it'll help a lot too.

 

[dnuggett]

Also look for any spyware with Search and Destroy and Adaware. You may also want to look at what programs are laoding at startup and get rid of what you don't need. Then under task manager look under processes, there will be entries you have never heard of before. Enter the name in a Google search and that should give you an idea if you want to delete it or not. Be careful here though. There are processes that are vital to your OS.

 

[wetcat007]

Windows takes up a ton of memory when it can.

 

[Medicated858]

Thanks for your help everyone. I finally got rid of some of the programs that loaded every restart.

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: Biggs
Start -> Run -> MSCONFIG
Then uncheck all the programs you don't need. Exercise a bit of caution though, as you might accidentally disable an "essential" program. Anyway, you can always re-enable it if something suddenly acts up.

Clarification: IN THE STARTUP TAB. Don't do anything in the services tab or you can really screw your computer up to the point where you need a reinstall. Hope you read this beforehand...