Billy wrote:

My laptop only recognizes 3G of the 22G chip sets installed.

I downloaded a memtest .iso and burned a CD on this same laptop.
Seems right after I shutdown the boot I can get things to run for a while.

I booted the CD and ran the test for 5 passes and all tested OK.

I am using a Samsung SSD 500G as my drive if that matters.

I just interchanged the memories to see what will it bring.

I still see
Physical total = 3.47G,
Phys Avail = 30MBytes.
Virtual 2.1G, Virtual Avail = 2.1G
Page File 6.8G
PageFile Avail 2.8G

System managed size for paging.

Process Explorer shows
Idle 90%
SeaMonkey Privates Bytes 150,976K Working Set 61,544K
All others half or less.


Paul wrote:
Billy wrote:

Laptop sat a few days on. Returned to find it unresponsive.
re-boot.
All back looking normal except try to run app and says not enough
resources.
Cold Boot.
All back looking normal now runs a few apps I tried.
But, A memory app I have says only 90K of 3.3G is available.
Process Explorer says only 100K of 3.3G available.
I see from Process Explorer that no app using any unreasonable memory.
System Cache 110K


Where else should I look or try ?

Memory fault or something more sinister ?

I tried to make my pagefile size larger, then use copies
of TestLimit to test the behavior. And in my test setup,
it works the way you would expect it to. When the last
copy of TestLimit cannot obtain enough RAM, the "low memory"
notice appear and TestLimit won't go any further. If you
kill off the TestLimit programs that are running, the
memory is returned, the pagefile no longer needs to
carry it all.

Looking at your numbers, something is filling the available
virtual memory, but it is also leaving some

In my Performance options, for "Memory usage", mine is set to

Adjust for best performance of:

[X] Programs [ ] System Cache

so less of an attempt should be made to turn the
memory into a "System Cache". Whatever that means.

The more modern versions of Windows have two caches.
There is the System Read cache (and that is not
charged against memory, so there is no numeric field
showing the size). As soon as the computer needs the
memory, it is instantly freed up.

The other kind of cache, is a System Write cache,
and that uses memory as a buffer. But only 1/8th ro
1/10th of memory is used to speed up writes. Those
bytes are charged, so you can see the Task Manager
memory line rise if the write cache is being used.

But none of this really aligns with what yours is doing.
While it could be the "Adjust for best performance" tick box,
I don't know what kind of System Cache they have in mind.
The way Read Caches work, they're a free lunch, so there's
really no reason not to use them.

Paul