system resources

[suzscott1]

i am running win ME. i go to my computer right click and go to performance. i check system rescource and i start out at 93% free. when i run a few programs and then close them it does not go back to 93%. in fact i am writing this and the curser is flashing and i am at 38% free. it seems the programs are not releasing the resource when i close them. i usally restart to regain 93%. please help.thanks.
scott

[ktkendall]

I do remember from the few computer programming courses that I took, that many programs are indeed like that in that they do not release the memory they allocate even when they are closed. It is just lazy coding by the programmers according to one of the teachers I had, this of course may or may not be the case with yours.. Also I do believe windows has to sometimes load certain things to run certain programs and does not release that memory either..How much memory do you have in your PC??

[Cricket]

Yeah, ktkendall is right. Although the program or application is supposed to release the resources once it's closed, that doesn't always happen. Sometimes you can get a patch or fix from the software company that will help with this problem, but most times they don't and you just have to deal with it...or upgrade to WinXP, then you won't have to worry about resources getting low.

Cricket

[galaxian]

I would recommend a run of SpyBot and see if Spyware isn't the issue.
Unless you are running a lot of old and/or non-standard software, releasing resources should not be an issue these days.

[suzscott1]

i have 383meg of pc ram. i will try to run spybot and see if this helps thanks. i will let all know the results

[glc]

The amount of physical ram you have makes no difference. Resources are a different animal - those are operating system "heaps" that cannot be increased, all you can do is be mindful of all the stuff that can run at startup and in the background. You would be very well served by upgrading to Win2000 or WinXP, that's a true 32 bit OS that doesn't have "heaps", it uses physical ram and the pagefile.