rec.autos.simulators

I have a PIII 600 with 256MB of RAM a TNT2 Ultra a Sound Blaster 567 and a
SCS2 HD. When I open mem turbo and I defrag and reset my RAM the free RAM
never goes over 127MB. Then when I check with Windows 98 utilities it says
that about 73 percent of my RAM is not being used. Then today miraculously I
got the free RAM to go up to 200MB but windows said only 53percent free. I
tried closing down all the little utilities I don't need but they only free
up 2-3MB. What the hell is going on with my computer?

thanks,

Wishkah

Sounds like you got a real lemon a system.  Tell you what I'll do just
cause I'm a nice guy. I trade you my AMD K6 2 400 with 128 meg ram
showing 90 % resources free and take your problem child in return.

1) Available RAM does not equal the percentages displayed in Resource Meter
(if that is where you're getting the 73% figure). Open the Win98 Resource
Kit (on the Win98 CD) for an explanation.

2) Do not mess with vcache settings. Yes, Win95 needed a bit of tuning with
vcache and fixed swap files and unfortunately all the advice people used to
give for Win95 has carried over to Win98. Win98 has much improved
memory/cache/swap management and it is best to leave it alone.

I'll tweak anything for an extra fps but there is no need to mess with
vcache. I've tried it and there was no performance improvement. People, this
is one thing MS has managed to get right (for the most part).

Now.. RAM.

If you want to see how RAM is used then open the System Monitor application
(sysmon.exe). When you start the machine and open a few big apps you'll
see available RAM drop to almost nothing. This is good.

Windows is grabbing all the memory it can find and using it. The bottom line
is that ~75-90% RAM usage is normal (and a good thing) -- if I paid for 256
MB and 50% was sitting unused
half of the time I'd be pissed off.

For more info try the newsgroup

The system resource question comes up daily. Read the group for a while and
you'll get a good feel for resource usage

Dale.

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Windows reserves a certain % of available memory for caching disk reads
(i.e., subsequent reads are fast).  The more memory available, the more
Windows will reserve.  In the c:\windows\system.ini file, you can add lines
to set the amount of memory, used for caching, to a FIXED size.  I have
256MB and I set this cache to 16MB.

[vcache]
Minfilecache=16384
Maxfilecache=16384

Hope this helps,
Brian

No thanks cause 90 percent free on your 128meg system is about 110MB but
when I have 50 of the resorces free on my computer that 128MB.

Wishkah