Windows system resources

[pugsly]

Heres one for you.... I keep having a reduction in free system resources and it drives me nuts. When I disable all the taskbar crap I get like 85% free, but then over a period of time it seems to get lower and lower and lower. What's that all about. I am running win 98 se on an amd system and 512 mb of ram. I turn off everything running in the background and still the same thing. Do I need to tweak something?

[galaxian]

System Resources, like RAM, are there to be used. The more the run, the more they are used. There is no need to be concerned until they get down into the teens.

[glc]

All programs use resources (which are NOT ram - they are operating system "heaps") and don't always give them all back when you close the program. Eventually you will have to reboot - "heaps" are a limitation of Windows 9x. NT-based operating systems like NT, 2K, and XP do not have this issue - they use physical ram and pagefiles (virtual memory) instead of "heaps". This is why I reboot 9x systems daily and NT based systems monthly.

[pugsly]

Glc, that makes alot of sense! I looked further into the issue and what you said jives. You think maybe I should upgrade to win 2k? I heard that its not so good for games and i love games...?

[glc]

Stick with 98SE for games, remove everything that's not essential from your startup, and reboot when resources drop below 20%. If you are gonna play a game, reboot before you start and don't open any nonessential programs while you are playing.

If you want to try Win2K, make sure all your hardware, software, and games are compatible first. It will be a heck of a lot more stable, but you will sacrifice frame rates to some extent.

[morriswindgate]

Go to the link below for a good explanation on system resources. After you have read this, go to the home page of the link and add it to your favorites as it has some excellant Windows OS information.

http://www.infinisource.com/techfiles/win-resources.html