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Windows 2000 Low memory usage...

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Philippine Mango

Diamond Member
I saw a picture posted by one of our forum members, had the blonde crew cut avatar, think it was deeko or something. Anyways I was wondering how he was able to get his memory usage in windows 2000 to be only 30MB of ram. I'm running W2000 on my virtual machine and my memory usage is significantly higher and I don't know why.
 
Tried turning off all the non-essential services and turning down all the GUI options? 30MB still sounds low for windows though...
 
I don't see the point, memory's cheap enough that it doesn't matter. Put 512M or more in a machine and move on, the time wasted trying to get it lower can be better used actually using the machine.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
I don't see the point, memory's cheap enough that it doesn't matter. Put 512M or more in a machine and move on, the time wasted trying to get it lower can be better used actually using the machine.
Click to expand...

Thanks for avoiding the point. I don't care 'how cheap' memory is, fsck I don't care even if they're so cheap that they're handing them out outside of best buy like as if they're hellokitty keychains promoting hello kitty brand... My point is, I want to be able to use as little memory as possible by the OS, if you're not going to post anything pertaining to my needs, then don't bother posting at all.

Oh and BTW, memory is cheap eh? You've got some RDRam lying around? Wanna give it away? Didn't think so.. The only memory that is cheap is DDR, and again, it's missing my point. I think the user who had this screen shot was deeko?
 
My point is, I want to be able to use as little memory as possible by the OS
Click to expand...

Which is stupid, the OS is there to facilitate your using the machine and it needs memory to do that. And using lots of memory for things like the filesystem cache will improve performance, so limiting the memory available to the OS is wrong.
 
Originally posted by: Philippine Mango
Originally posted by: Nothinman
I don't see the point, memory's cheap enough that it doesn't matter. Put 512M or more in a machine and move on, the time wasted trying to get it lower can be better used actually using the machine.
Click to expand...

Thanks for avoiding the point. I don't care 'how cheap' memory is, fsck I don't care even if they're so cheap that they're handing them out outside of best buy like as if they're hellokitty keychains promoting hello kitty brand... My point is, I want to be able to use as little memory as possible by the OS, if you're not going to post anything pertaining to my needs, then don't bother posting at all.

Oh and BTW, memory is cheap eh? You've got some RDRam lying around? Wanna give it away? Didn't think so.. The only memory that is cheap is DDR, and again, it's missing my point. I think the user who had this screen shot was deeko?
Click to expand...


Whoa...take your pills and count to ten.

 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
My point is, I want to be able to use as little memory as possible by the OS
Click to expand...

Which is stupid, the OS is there to facilitate your using the machine and it needs memory to do that. And using lots of memory for things like the filesystem cache will improve performance, so limiting the memory available to the OS is wrong.
Click to expand...


I was just going to post the same thing ...... absolutely true!
 
There's good reason for wanting mem usage cut to a minimum. For example, my laptop is 800 mhz/128 MB with win2000. To bump it up to 256 would cost about $50, but with new laptops going for 400-500 in the hot deals sections sometimes, it's not worth it.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
My point is, I want to be able to use as little memory as possible by the OS
Click to expand...

Which is stupid, the OS is there to facilitate your using the machine and it needs memory to do that. And using lots of memory for things like the filesystem cache will improve performance, so limiting the memory available to the OS is wrong.
Click to expand...

So when you see vista bloat to 512MB of ram, is that going to be your excuse again? "memory being cheap" is a stupid arguement, it costs money nonetheless. If I can postpone/avoid an upgrade altogether via a free tweak, wtf not?
 
So when you see vista bloat to 512MB of ram, is that going to be your excuse again?
Click to expand...

I'm not making execuses for anything, I'm trying to help you understand why your tweaks are mostly pointless. You might speed up your boot process a bit, but that's about it, and you can do that by using hibernation anyway. And I don't care how much memory Vista requires, I'll never see it.

"memory being cheap" is a stupid arguement, it costs money nonetheless. If I can postpone/avoid an upgrade altogether via a free tweak, wtf not?
Click to expand...

Because you're looking at the wrong area to tweak. Memory management is an extremely complicated subject and very hard to tweak properly. Even if you are able to get your initial commit charge down to 30M the rest of your memory will be quickly eaten up by filesystem cache and other things. And that's exactly what would happen even if you hadn't disabled those services, it just would have taken a bit longer for NT to realize that the services were idle and can be evicted from memory. And memory usage will vary depending on drivers, amount of filesystems mounted, installed software, how long the box has been up, etc.
 
Originally posted by: Evander
There's good reason for wanting mem usage cut to a minimum. For example, my laptop is 800 mhz/128 MB with win2000. To bump it up to 256 would cost about $50, but with new laptops going for 400-500 in the hot deals sections sometimes, it's not worth it.
Click to expand...


That laptop would run Windows 2000 great. I installed 2kpro on a friends desktop with a 400mhz Celeron and 96mb ram. There's been no problems at all. It doesn't take a monster machine to run 2000. If you can't run that, it's just time to get a new machine, or switch to DOS.
 
Well my laptop does run win2k great, I can simultaneously use firefox + tbird + winamp without getting bogged down. I also run Microsoft Visual Studio on it, a bit slow but fast enough. The reason I think it runs pretty well is because I've cut down alot of crap running in the background to save RAM (also using tweakui to cut down windows animations and crap for an extra boost). That's really the point- optimizing RAM usage lets you get the most out of your system (especially a low end system) and I think the OP would agree.
 
There was a website I ran across awhile back that showed how to get windows XP to run on a 486 with 8meg RAM. Took 5-minutes to boot or something like that.

Philippine Mango needs a link 🙂
 
Simply download the msconfig file for WinXP. Put it in the WinNT folder and then it will work just like in XP. Turn off all the unecessary software that is probably running in the background.

Personally, if I was running a low power/memory limited laptop I would just go for WinME.
Use IE Eradicator, run Opera 9 and delete the Windows Media Player and put in a more efficient MP3/media player (like Ultra Player).

There are a few memory tweaks you can do to keep from having to reboot that often if you need to leave the machine running for long periods of time.

Though I have found that if you tweak WinXP to the max, get rid of the GUI stuff, turn off indexing and a bunch of services not needed you can get it to run almost as efficiently as Win2K.
 
Got to ask this question then;

If Win9X was so horrible, then why didn't you switch over to linux back then and be done with Windows altogether?😉

I don't remember any more complaints about Windows before 2000/XP then we have right now.

WinXP certainly runs things better in most ways then Win9X. Not a night and day difference, but definately an improvement. On the other hand, you can tweak Win9X more radically without the dreaded file protection crap.

If I got a lot of use out of my 2000 Corvette Z06 back in the day, does that mean it sucks today because it only has 400 horses vs. the 500 horsepower of the 2006 model?

Does that mean I would rather walk then drive the older Corvette because the newer one is definately better??????


 
If you can run ME, you can and should run 2k. It's just so much more dependable and stable. Also, a lot of apps are requiring NT these days. Can you run .net apps on 9x? I dont recall..


 
If Win9X was so horrible, then why didn't you switch over to linux back then and be done with Windows altogether?
Click to expand...

Believe me, I tried. I installed RH52 so many times that I can't remember much more than the installation screens. But back then Linux was a very different beast, the installation was a lot more difficult, I had a WinModem in my machine, the only browser worth using was Netscape 4.x, Gnome and KDE were nowhere to be seen, etc. Now in many cases you can get a full working installation all working and patched in under a half hour.

If I got a lot of use out of my 2000 Corvette Z06 back in the day, does that mean it sucks today because it only has 400 horses vs. the 500 horsepower of the 2006 model?
Click to expand...

I bet your 2000 vette didn't randomly swerve into oncoming traffic though either, did it?

Does that mean I would rather walk then drive the older Corvette because the newer one is definately better??????
Click to expand...

If the old one had defects that made it a PITA to use, like Win9X, yes.
 
If Win9X was so horrible, then why didn't you switch over to linux back then and be done with Windows altogether?
Click to expand...

Or how about Windows NT 4 which was so much better than that piece of turd called Win98/ME.

I'd rather run Windows NT 3.1 RTM than POS Windows 98/ME.

Windows 9X was horrible, evne back in its time. Windows 2000/XP are light years ahead of where Windows 9X was, even for their respective times. Almnost every OS released since 1994 is far better than Windows 9X/ME.
 
I respect you guys hating Win9X.

But if we search the archives here, nobody every complained about Win9X this much or said it was this bad. And yes, Windows NT was available back then.

I like WinXP more, it is better. But back in the day I never had problems as bad as you guys are describing. And yes, lately I have set up Windows ME as mentioned above and it ran great in a Pentium 2 laptop that was absolutely dragging with Win2K.
 
Originally posted by: rogue1979
I respect you guys hating Win9X.

But if we search the archives here, nobody every complained about Win9X this much or said it was this bad. And yes, Windows NT was available back then.

I like WinXP more, it is better. But back in the day I never had problems as bad as you guys are describing. And yes, lately I have set up Windows ME as mentioned above and it ran great in a Pentium 2 laptop that was absolutely dragging with Win2K.
Click to expand...



I hated the OS a lot. Most people I knew thought it was a piece of junk, even back in its time. Those same people found Windows NT 4 RTM to be much more stable and efficient.
 
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