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WinXP/Win2k Memory Leak???

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d3vil

Senior member
I have this weird problem with Win2K (SP3) and WinXP (SP1) where I run out of memory (or it seems like i did) but if i go to task manager it says I haven't used up all my physical ram yet nor my swap space.. However, When I open too many programs at once or leave the pc on for too long (days, maybe a week or so), sometimes the screen doesn't draw the windows widgets properly for any program (even if i go to task manager, some of the tabs are missing or blank).. As soon as I close a program I seem to have enough memory temporarily to another program or open any kind of menu (a right click menu for instance). But sooner or later even that isn't enough, as I have to close even more programs until I finally can't even open one program.. I dont believe this is a trojan or anything because this has happened on fairly fresh installations of windows (about a few days old for instance). The amount of ram I have right now is 256 MB ram, and I put initial and max virtual mem to 512 mb. I'm wondering if this is normal for other people? I thought Win2k/Winxp should be decent enough to handle with 256 MB ram, and also it doesn't seem as if it's using the whole thing according to task manager. As for possible ram defects, I once ran memtest on this piece of ram a while back with no problems, but maybe i should run it again just to be positive. FYI, it's a Crucial 256 MB DDR PC 2100 stick.. Any ideas on this wacky "mem leak" like problem?

Also as for turning down all the gfx, I have turned off every visual eye candy feature I could possibly find in WinXP to make it like win2k.. So i'm trying to use the least amount of memory possible. But this problem is rather annoying and happens still..

Thanks..
 
Win2K/WinXP is still limited to about 12000 user & GDI resources across all applications combined. Past this point things become pretty unstable.

You would think they would have true 32-bit resource handles by now but sadly this is not the case.
It has nothing to do with your RAM.

In task manager go to select columns on the view menu and turn on USER objects & GDI Objects to see which processes are hogging them.

Perhaps in 64-bit windows they'll finally upgrade to 32-bit handles. The handles are currently really 14-bit not even 16-bit BTW because the low order 2 bits are always 0 (legacy from when they used to be pointers into a 64K space where the resources were stored).
 
I see.. I will check next time my system does that again for how many GDI/USER objs i have.. Out of curiosity do you have any source or documentation where this information can be found? I just want to be positive that this is definitely the problem..

Thanks for the info...

 
here ya go:

Info on NT-based OS resource limits I'm sure I've seen more detailed info before but google doesn't want to find it today...

In Win2K, the registry keys for these limits, which you can raise a little but over 16K won't actually work, are under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows
 
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