Is this OK

[William]

Thought I'd ask, G620 intel processor , These figures are after I'd run Lightroom and PS CS6 for processing , CPU back to idle , 4 gig of RAM but I've been told XP cant use all of 4 gig , Looks liken it's about 3.5 available , I know it's an ordinary system , But it works I guess

[ameerat42]

William, are you thinking it shouldn't be usage 0?

When all tasks are finished it often goes to that level.

Open task Mgr and then run Lightroom/CS6. You will see a lot more, ~60% betimes.
Am.

[William]

Thanks AM, Yeah I know it should be at 0 at idle , That makes sense , I was wondering if the figures look all right overall , Those figures are after running Lightroom and CS6 , Thats pretty well loaded my pooter to the max of ram usage that I need

[Bally]

Hey William,

4 gig should be ok for XP, my understanding anyway, that is that XP can use all of it.

Those numbers are saying that at peak usage you didn't use all of the 4 gig, about 1.5 and that you have about 3 gig in paging memory on top of the physical ram (paging memory is the harddisk pretending to be ram, and is handy in emergencies, but way slower than ram) WAY WAY slower. In the old days, they used to say that if it took one second to fetch the data from physical ram, it would take 33 days to get it from paging memory, so that is the relative speeds we are talking about. (if someone has the updated numbers on this, I would be curious to hear)

Here is a good site that explains this in detail

http://pcwizkid.wordpress.com/2008/0...s-task-manage/

Hope that helps

Cheers

[Chris G]

Actually XP Pro/Home can not use the total 4Gb of Ram. As can you see under the physical memory (K) it can only see / use 3.5Gb of Hardware RAM ..

Needless to say you have more than enough for XP and William is right about the page file which they also remcommend using another Hard drive purely for the page file as it was alittle quicker than having it based on
your C:\ Drive where your OS is installed along with everything else in most case's.

Basic rule is 32bit OS can hold upto whatever you like with hardware RAM but will only show & use 3.5Gbs which that includes Win 7 32bit aswell.. 64Bit are the only operating systems (OS)
that can support and use upto 64Gbs of RAM under Win 7 /Mac

Win XP 64bit version supports up to 16 GB of RAM and 16 TB of virtual memory if you ever wanted to get your hands on a copy

Cheers

Chris