Does RAM clog up?

[Jimmy]

Hi

I have now got 768mb of DDR RAM and things were really fast for a day but this afternoon I got the message "windows is incressing your virtual memory minimum" or something like that pop up from my taskbar.

I am woundering if RAM gets cloged up with old Data? Like a harddrive wich needs defraging, is there a way to get my RAM working at its optimum?

At te moment I have fs running in the background, just cruising over the tasman and a few other things running like a wordprocessor, msn, photoshop, fsscreen and of course this firefox window im typeing in, and if I bring msn up from the taskbar itll take ages to load up and my mouse is really slow moveing, it sutters as im moveing it accros the screen wich is reallly frustrating!


Thanks
James

[ZK-MAT]

Photoshop would take up quite a bit of memory, and having all that going, and FS wouldn't help the PC speed for sure

[Alex]

Fyi MSWord eats up a lot of resources (at least from my experience), if I need to open up a text editor while flying, I use notepad.

Alex

[creator2003]

well i have none of those things running while simming exspeicaly not photoshop that is use about 30% to 40% of the cpu etc...add the sim and you got 100% slow things happen then,,
,i changed my virtual memory amount down to a lower value and ive never seen that message again i did turn it up before that thinking more is better but in this case it worked going lower
i close everything down before i sim i hate having things jar spit and die

[Alex]

Thats the way to do it natas, not like me, usually FS, IvAe, IE, notepad, and maybe MS WMP .

I get that message every now and then, but quite rarely, and usually just ignore it. I mean, its says its going to fix the problem so why stress?

Alex

[Zöltuger]

well virtual memory uses the hard disk, so its slower...
as people have said, closing programs will help.

[ardypilot]

as people have said, closing programs will help.

Indeed, I shut down everything but fs9 and Screen-Hunter when simming.

A handly little tool to help with this is 'FSAutoStart' from Avsim: http://library.avsim.net/search.php?Sea ... &Go=Search

FSAutoStart allows the user the ability to automatically shutdown services and programs to provide as much resources to running today's most demanding applications. It also provides the ability to launch selected programs before the application is launched. Lastly, it can automatically restart those programs and services previously shutdown, thus bringing the computer back to its original state. It also adds some performance enhancing options like Defragment Memory. Build 11 24 November 2004 • Made code to start/stop programs and services multi-threaded for faster execution • Added a few more descriptions for possible error messages when starting/stopping services • Fixed bug that caused crash in GUI when loading a profile with a filename longer than 20 characters • Added auto-arrange to the main profile window (icons will arrange themselves as the window is resized)

[brownbox]

photoshop just by itself usues a LOT of memory. Firefox uses a little bit too.

[Zenith]

I use a proggy called FreeRam XP, that way I can see how much of my RAM resources I have left and when it reaches a certain level it does a clean up! Although if you flick around in flightsim to much evn this is not enough to run out of virtual memory.
Having to many things open is not a wise thing and slows down your PC! Considering how resource hungry Flightsim is.

[HardCorePawn]

meh... just install 3gigs[1] of RAM like I did

seriously tho, you might want to consider closing down everything but FS... its not like you've really got time to do much else but fly when you're simming... unless you're one of these heavy metal ( ???) types that cruises for 3+ hours on autopilot at FL350

and if you're running XP, anything less than 1gig and you can almost guarantee the comp will be running on virtual (ie. harddrive) memory...


cheers,
HCP

[1] should be 4gigs, but one of the sticks is dodgy and i'm still trying to sort out an RMA for it all...

[Alex]

Oh, sorry, to answer Jimmy's question, RAM does not 'clog up'. Once you close a program that is using ram, more space (the same amount the program was using) becomes free quite quickly.

Alex

[gokanru]

AS far as virtual memory goes I use another drive,and put my virtual ram on that.This gives a performance lift as info can be read and written from one drive to another a lot faster than if it reads and writes to the same drive.I always close off all programs except screen grabber,but more memory gives better performance.I would have to say Jimmy that you had too many open programs and that was what was sucking up your resources.