Subj : Learned something new To : Ky Moffet From : Barry Martin Date : Tue Jul 23 2024 07:50:00 Hi Ky! You replied to my replied to Ed but I think he'll see it. > 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. KM> Lost track of the message, but anyway.... by itself, 32bit XP KM> with default drivers uses 386mb RAM (I've seen this number over KM> and over) or if it's dual-booted with ReactOS, for some reason KM> only uses 80mb RAM. Either way, it's not the major problem. Yes, I've seen that 386 MB usage figure numerous times; don't know if someone measured once and everyone reused that data or what but seems to make sense: the work data is stored someplace and takes up space. Odd how the number is slashed with ReactOS -- I'd guess the 'missing' memory could be found in the dual-boot partition. KM> Browsers are the biggest hogs, I've seen Chrome suck up 40GB KM> (yes, gigabytes) of RAM! Supermium, despite being based on the KM> same code, is not as greedy, but still uses about 700mb when it's KM> just admiring its navel, plus about 2GB per page open. 40 GB!! And for a while we were installing 8 or 16 GB of RAM and thought sufficient! (Horray for Swap!) KM> How on earth did you have 28 to 32 programs running -- doing KM> what? I have 4 or 5 apps that are open all the time, but KM> otherwise... are you sure you're not counting multiple windows KM> for a single program? You might want to set them to "group when KM> taskbar is full". I was thinking Ed was counting all the open windows and some windows were multiple of the same utility. Right now I have 8 windows open for different LibreOffice documents. Obviously I'm not working on them all at the same time but open because of current projects. ...Add a few more or add a new one with a huge import and LibreOffice will start complaining. (From what I've read more of an issue with LibreOffice than memory, processsor, etc.) Otherwise here I can have concurrently open utilities for e-mail, temperature monitoring, viewing remote desktops, and the scripts 'snooping' on the other computers to make sure they're operating correctly. All those little functions make the count go up quickly, so I could see Ed's getting to two and three dozen. KM> Best thing to check is Task Manager, it'll give you a lot of KM> information. I leave it running in the system tray all the time, KM> cuz it doesn't eat much (at least on older Windows; on 10/11 it KM> uses way too much RAM). Agree on using Task Manager -- and a reminder to open all the view options: with System Monitor on Linux there are options to view User, Active, All and Dependencies so assume something similar for Windows XP. ....Click for sorting so don't have to scroll though the list! > I'm pretty much only using (Virtual) XP for the BBS stuff and haven't > fiddled around in ages. At the Command Prompt 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 KM> I think it's seeing only the mini-VM (I forget what it's called) KM> 32-bit XP uses to run DOS programs. It's certainly not seeing KM> system RAM. Probably so, else it's the computer version of the elusive perpetual motion machine! > 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. KM> Might have run the heaps dry. However, then you normally get a KM> wonky screen where if you drag a window around it looks like KM> this: KM> http://doomgold.com/images/linux/snapshot5-smplayer.png KM> Incidentally that screenshot was from linux, not immune to this KM> issue. Yup: I've seen it on my system which isn't in the whimpy department. Extremely rarely seen, but as I recall when there's some heavy system loading going on. > .. If mediums can communicate with dead imagine what large can do! KM> Bring back the mammoths, and smallpox, and dinosaurs.... And burning at the stake! KM> Hmm. Maybe try smalls. They just talk quietly amongst themselves! ¯ ® ¯ BarryMartin3@MyMetronet.NET ® ¯ ® .... What's worse then tendinitis? Elevendinitis! --- MultiMail/Win32 v0.47 þ wcECHO 4.2 ÷ ILink: The Safe BBS þ Bettendorf, IA --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .