Subj : Re: Learned something new
To   : Barry Martin
From : Ky Moffet
Date : Mon Jul 22 2024 14:38:00

BARRY MARTIN wrote:
> Subject: Learned something new to me
> 
> 
> Hi Ed!
> 
>   EV> The XP Taskbar has 28 to 32 programs open when I wanted to Open
>   EV> another File, but nothing happened.
>   EV> The XP box has 3GB RAM which I thought should allow me to do
>   EV> anything that I wanted to do when I bought it in 2006.

Lost track of the message, but anyway.... by itself, 32bit XP with 
default drivers uses 386mb RAM (I've seen this number over and over) or 
if it's dual-booted with ReactOS, for some reason only uses 80mb RAM. 
Either way, it's not the major problem.

Browsers are the biggest hogs, I've seen Chrome suck up 40GB (yes, 
gigabytes) of RAM! Supermium, despite being based on the same code, is 
not as greedy, but still uses about 700mb when it's just admiring its 
navel, plus about 2GB per page open.

How on earth did you have 28 to 32 programs running -- doing what? I 
have 4 or 5 apps that are open all the time, but otherwise... are you 
sure you're not counting multiple windows for a single program? You 
might want to set them  to "group when taskbar is full".

Best thing to check is Task Manager, it'll give you a lot of 
information. I leave it running in the system tray all the time, cuz it 
doesn't eat much (at least on older Windows; on 10/11 it uses way too 
much RAM).


> I'm pretty much only using (Virtual) XP for the BBS stuff and haven't
> fiddled around in ages.  At the Command Promot tyoe 'mem' and see if any
> hints there.
> 
> Mine comes out really strangely:
> 
>      655360 bytes total conventional memory
>      655360 bytes available to MS-DOS
>      634048 largest executable program size
> 
>     1048576 bytes total contiguous extended memory
>           0 bytes available contiguous extended memory
>      941056 bytes available XMS memory
>             MS-DOS resident in High Memory Area

I think it's seeing only the mini-VM (I forget what it's called) 32-bit 
XP uses to run DOS programs. It's certainly not seeing system RAM.

> I'm thinking maybe the reason you can't open your 40th window is there
> is not you're out of system memory but rather you're out of memory for
> whatever application governs the files.

Might have run the heaps dry. However, then you normally get a wonky 
screen where if you drag a window around it looks like this:

http://doomgold.com/images/linux/snapshot5-smplayer.png

Incidentally that screenshot was from linux, not immune to this issue.



> .. If mediums can communicate with dead imagine what large can do!

Bring back the mammoths, and smallpox, and dinosaurs....

Hmm. Maybe try smalls.
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