[techie4fun]

Ok, so I've got 1 gig of ram installed in my machine but when using a program such as free ram optimizer xp it states that I only have 730 megabytes of ram to use. Does WIndows restrict the rest for system resources or are you really able to get the approx amount into use?

[TheNameless]

730 is most probably your physical RAM, and not your virtual memory space.

[jbking]

What kind of video card do you have on the system? It may be that some of the system RAM is being taken by the video card.Regards,JB

[DeadEye]

Hi, if you have 1 Gig of RAM sticks installed on your motherboard, most software that reports the total remaining RAM while Windows is running will commonly report that 250 to 300 MB of RAM are currently being used, and this may be with no other apparent apps running. The processes alone, depending on the version of XP you run will take up from 250 to 300 + MB. I have a Gig of RAM on my Media Center Edition XP notebook, and right now with Firefox running and nothing other than background processes running, 327 MB of RAM are in use. That usage for mostly processes you cannot even see suggests it is a good idea to have a Gig of RAM in your XP machine. Some of this used memory could be from the swap file, but normally XP does not swap out data in memory to the HD unless the available RAM gets low.

[techie4fun]

[quote name='jbking']What kind of video card do you have on the system? It may be that some of the system RAM is being taken by the video card.> > > > Regards,> > JBI'm running an ATI-Radeon X800 GTO 256 Memory 256-BIT

[techie4fun]

[quote name='TheNameless']730 is most probably your physical RAM, and not your virtual memory space.Thats probably what I'm seeing right now. Thanks for the post.

[TheNameless]

Physical RAM is usually very low, seeing as the opearting system is constantly copying information from the hard drive to the RAM.Most RAM optimizers just allocate more space in the physical RAM. There may be other factors, but you shouldn't worry too much about what your RAM optimizer says, unless you're down to a ridiculously low number.