How do I free up some RAM

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twad007

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#8437 30-Jun-2006 06:46

Hi All,

I want to free up as much RAM (as you might've guessed from the subject line) on my laptop as possible so I can play my game. How do I go about doing this?
I'm pretty sure there are a lot of programs that my comp is running from startup, that aren't neccessary. How do I determine which are/aren't neccessary.
I would love to post a screen shot of the Processes tab in Task Manager, but I don't know how to. I don't think I can paste a screen shot in this forum, or can I?

A few Specs:
Processor: Intel Mobile Intel (R) Pentium (R) 4 CPU 3.06Hz, 3067.0 Mhz
Memory: (Total/Available)
System: 448.0 / 196.2
Virtual: 2047.9 / 2010.9
Pagefile: 1385.5 / 1202.5

*I could somehow post the background processes if anyone would find it helpful.

Thanks anyone who could help me out

freitasm

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#40142 30-Jun-2006 08:34

All replies please to http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=37&topicid=8438

tonyhughes

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#40144 30-Jun-2006 08:44

You have a reasonable amount of ram (512MB with 64MB being used by your on board graphics card).

You can screen shot anything by pressing PrtScn (should be on the top row of keys), now your screen shot is on the clipboard. I then paste it into Powerpoint or Publisher, and right click the resulting pic, and click "save as" (yes Geeks, its clunky, but it works, and its one less program i need installed...).

If you email the pic to tony.hughes at this sites domain, I will post it on this thread.

Empty out things in START > All Programs > Startup that you dont think you need (actually just cut and paste the icons to your desktop, so you can put them back if need be.

Go to control panel, and add/remove programs. Remove everything that you have knowingly installed, but havent used for at least say, 3 months. Be ruthless, you can always re-install later if you need to use something. Once most of this stuff is gone, as long as you use up to date spyware and virus software (use MS Antispyware and Avast if you dont have anything installed), you probably wont need to worry about background processes.

Dont download and run any RAM free-ers or RAM optimisers. Although some can provide extremely MINOR gains, most of it is snake-oil packaged with spyware.

Defrag your hard drive. Often.

If you run things like Google Desktop or MSN desktop, Picasa, blah blah blah, consider disabling these programs ability to always monitor your system for changes. This eats up resources.

How many IM programs are you running? Could you ditch ICQ, AOL, and GoogleTalk in favour of GAIM which handles all three (and therefore free up more RAM).

196MB free ram on an XP system with 512MB sounds normal to me. If you would like more, im picking the best way for you to achieve that, is to buy some more physical ram.

This is probably what you would need to double your RAM and extend the useful life of your lappy, though we would need your laptop model to confirm. DSE may install this for you (they did mine for free in Napier some time ago).

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need further info.

freitasm

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#40147 30-Jun-2006 08:48

tonyhughes: You can screen shot anything by pressing PrtScn (should be on the top row of keys), now your screen shot is on the clipboard. I then paste it into Powerpoint or Publisher, and right click the resulting pic, and click "save as" (yes Geeks, its clunky, but it works, and its one less program i need installed...).

Or to Paint (run PBRUSH), and save as .JPG. Paint is smaller and it's always installed with Windows.