Is your memory getting worse?

Badger · Post by **Badger** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 1:26 pm

If any of you are a little lazy around your PC maintenance as I am, this may be useful:

When I first got my current rig about 7 months ago it was runnning on a zippy, gorgeous 4GB of physical ram upon which everything pootled along at a rate of knots. About a week ago I was looking for ways to enhance my IL2 settings and happended to look at my system info. The Shock!!

The horror!!

- According to my system diagnostics I only had 0.9 Gig of the original 4 available for my system to play with!! I know the system cacheing and kernal will take a fair whack of this but - "I say!!"

With hands clenched to the heavens I hear you cry "WHYYYYYY???". Sloppiness on my part. I activated loads of free software I got with the machine, of which the main culprit was MS SQL Server. Because of a bug (for which a hot fix is available) in the app it partitions 50% (yes 50%) of the available physical ram to do it's bidding, so with the other nonsense I had installed there was nothing left!! Also being a helpful app; SQLSvr ran itself in the background for me, which was really nice of it!

"So Badger, what did you do??" Well it was like being on the Japanese side of last Sundays coop I can tell you!! I deinstalled everything that I hadn't used in the last 2 months. The result? The only thing I'm interested in is IL2 on this machine and now it runs a lot better than it did. Smoother and much more snoggable! Huzzar! The system now has only 23% of the full allocation to itself, which is better.

Does anyone have any ideas/guidelines on how much the system really needs? Don't forget to make a restore point and/or back up your system before you start poking around!

:FI:Sneaky_Russian · Post by **:FI:Sneaky_Russian** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 1:59 pm

have a look at "Task Manager" Il2 uses about 350 mb in a 1 plane DF
( I was looking at that last night) - try running "Black Death " track and checking usage.

Advanced Windows Care is a useful freebie http://www.iobit.com/

You can use the startup manager to stop non essential stuff starting with Windows.

Badger · Post by **Badger** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:01 pm

Thanks Sneaky!

I've been searching all week for an authority which can advise on how much of your total physical memory is used by the bios, Windows and other apps and how this can be managed, but to no avail.

Just about to give the track a go.....

Badger · Post by **Badger** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:26 pm

Well the biggest track seemed to be the Kamikaze02 track which swallowed a juicy 502 meg! Crikey!

The quest continues!

L.F · Post by **L.F** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:27 pm

:FI:Sneaky_Russian wrote: Advanced Windows Care is a useful freebie http://www.iobit.com/

You can use the startup manager to stop non essential stuff starting with Windows.

Thanks Sneaky, this program was really helpfull.

:FI:Sneaky_Russian · Post by **:FI:Sneaky_Russian** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:38 pm

I think it may be Registry Mechanic or System mechanic or some such that has a physical memory de-frag. I've used whatever it was have to close it before il2 starts or tries to start in game and causes stutters.

Anyway 4 G shouldnt be a problem, have you checked virtual memory.

Is something else (like Norton) eating away resources?

You could also look at these http://www.airwarfare.com/tech/utilities.htm

Filing System Utilities

Cacheman Windows 95,98,ME & XP
FS AutoStart
Lavalys
Page Defrag
WinRAR
WinZip

Badger · Post by **Badger** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 4:50 pm

Thanks again, I'll have a look for a physical memory defrager!

The crazy thing is that before I removed the software that I didn't need, having IL2, TS or Skype active with the virus checker running made the perfromance feel pitiful even with the 4G. I think the VC software doesn't help!

:FI:Sneaky_Russian · Post by **:FI:Sneaky_Russian** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 5:15 pm

One other solution.(as used by TacticalS! and me)

Make a partition and install XP ,Il2,Teamspeak, Track IR and any other game related software and have a dedicated boot (set iexplorer to work offline here.

Windows Firewall and AVG are all I have on my gaming/ AV production boot.

(My system ended up that way partly by accident, but eventually by design. A good way to disable Iexplorer and Firefox is by installing an AOL router - just so long as your not with AOL

) Since most attacks come via browsers my SATA drive is closed off when I boot from the IDE to surf.

Post by **:FI:Gurberly** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 5:40 pm

MS SQL Server??

Please send me the disk!!!

G

AltarBoy · Post by **AltarBoy** » Sat Jan 20, 2007 10:14 pm

I use an app called WinXP Manager. It cleans out my registry and compacts it. It also defrags my RAM and Disk cache and overall speeds up my CPU.

:FI:Igor · Post by **:FI:Igor** » Sun Jan 21, 2007 1:59 am

My computer was running like crap; 1946 video was jerky. Removed all the crap on my system that i haven't used in years (close to 90 gig), defraged, the whole nine yards...still jerky video...discovered thru the Task Manager, that a process called MsMpEng.exe was hogging up my CPU time.; its a function of MicroSoft Defender (a free spyware scanner). The process would fire up even if a turned off the Defender program. Check to see if Virus software is firing up during games.

Igor

Badger · Post by **Badger** » Sun Jan 21, 2007 11:45 am

Fantastic - thanks - I'll check all these out.

Interestingly, Windows doesn't seem to recognise all my RAM, so I visited the Dell web site and found this:

Systems that support hot-plug, hot-swap, and hot-add PCI capabilities, with 4GB of memory installed may not report or have access to all physical memory. An indication of this is the operating system reporting less available memory than the amount of memory physically present in the system.

Hot-plug, hot-swap and hot-add PCI capabilities require that a certain amount of memory in the upper range of the 4GB address space be reserved. PCI devices installed in a system require all of their resources to be defined and mapped in the 32-bit address (4GB) space. The Flash Memory and APIC controllers are located at the top of memory at address 0xFEC00000 and above, other PCI devices are defined below this address range. Physical memory, which exists in this high address space, may be unusable by the operating system.

Windows operating systems that support hot-plug, hot-swap, and hot-add PCI capabilities have this limitation by design, with the exception of Microsoft® Windows® 2000 which uses a 36-bit address space that allows you to use the /PAE (physical address extension) switch in the boot.ini file to reclaim this memory.

Interesting eh?!

Sorry Gurberly, I've had a look for the SQL Server disks and it looks like I didn't get them with the PC.