2GB installed, only 1GB in use?

I have recently installed 2GB of Ram to overcome system stability
problems; I was working on solid models of castings; swept shapes
intersecting features from many directions with fillets to smooth
transitions, internal and external detail.

The system is now stable however a memory manager that I have installed
shows that the RAM memory usage rarely exceeds a 1GB level mostly
staying around 800-900 KB. I dont know if the system is any faster, I
believe it is.

My question is; how do you know if the full potential of the 2GB RAM is
being used, are there any settings that need to be set to in Windows XP
Pro?

Any feedback appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

I've got 2.5 GB on my machine and our FEA machine has 4 GB. We've never
changed anything in Windows XP Pro to use the RAM. My machine usually gets
to at least 1.3 GB, sometimes as high as 1.6 GB before SW starts getting
flaky or crashes. The FEA machine seems to be quite happy up to 1.6 GB and
has gotten over 2.0 GB without crashing.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

I'm a fan of the 3gb switch in XP Pro. I have seen memory usage hit 2.6 gb
before freezing up

Mike

 

If I remember correctly, no matter how much ram you have installed, XP will
take half of the available ram for it's self.
You had 1GB installed and going by the amount of ram you were using, you
must have had a lot of pagefile usage and disk thrashing going on. Now that
you have more ram, your system should be a lot more stable.

 

Thanks for the feedback.
Looks as if everything is as it should be. XP seems to be a hungry
critter, a regular Mr 50%.

 

In the task manager go to the processes tab. Bring down the view menu
and click Select Columns. Pick "Mem Usage" and "Virtual Memory Size".
This will allow you to see how much memory an application is using from
physical ram and how much is being squirreled away in disk cache. If
you run a benchmark like PatBench with 11 or 12 iterations selected you
should see Mem Usage peak at whatever your system is capable of before
SW crashes. If you crash at 1.6 Gb or so, then enable the 3Gb switch
and try again. You should be able to hit around 2.6 Gb before crashing
SW.

You can get PatBench at:

http://www.engtran.com/SWBM001.html

 

You can access all 3 parts of an article series on the 3Gb switch here.
http://www.swcommunity.com/featuretoctnt.php

Or if you can't get into there, you can also find it here.
http://kcswug.com/documents/articles/
This is a link into the articles directory of our SW User group site. I put
a copy of several misc articles I have written or collected, so take a look
at what else is there - you might find something else that tickles your
fancy.

WT

 

Great...Thanks

 

Is the Microsoft Hotfix still required with SP2 for Xp?

Regards

John Layne

 

No, I've verified that on my machine. Xp Sp2 does not require the patch
that was required for XP SP1.

WT

 

Thanks Wayne, I'll set-up the switch this morning. It did cross my mind
that setting the switch and having models that don't need that much RAM
may actually slow the machine down? That is if windows needs to page
bits of itself to the hard drive constantly-- just a thought.

John Layne

 

That would be an interesting test to run. I found that with what I deal
with most of the time, I just leave it on.

WT