I have 2GB memory in my computer, there is only 1.3GB free so my pc seems to be chewing up alot, this is with only 2 internet explorer pages open..

Any ideas anyone?........

:O -- Are you on vista?

sorry but rubbish.Where are you getting this info from?
if you want to stop programs from starting go to the run box and type
msconfig and go to the last card and de-select any programs you wish not to start with windows.
If its vista right click on the tool bar at the bottom of screen -select properties.then start menu-then customise and find and select run command,go into menu and type in msconfig then the startup card,de select any you wish not to run with widows start up.

:O -- Are you on vista?

No I'm running Windows XP.

sorry but rubbish.Where are you getting this info from?
if you want to stop programs from starting go to the run box and type
msconfig and go to the last card and de-select any programs you wish not to start with windows.
If its vista right click on the tool bar at the bottom of screen -select properties.then start menu-then customise and find and select run command,go into menu and type in msconfig then the startup card,de select any you wish not to run with widows start up.

The info i am getting is from task manager.

Which bit are you looking at in the taskmanager? The correct bit to examine would be the commit charge.

Mine for example shows 614M/3939M, I'm running quite a lot, including a webserver and media server, plus multiple firefox tabs and bittorrent. The 3939 is the total of physical and swap space, 2GB of each roughly.

How much stuff do you have running in the taskbar? As it's running apps in the taskbar that uses up memory, that and having loads and loads of icons on the desktop.

Clean up your desktop and only put essential stuff in the taskbar, and you should free up some memory, also check your startup folder, if there's a lot of stuff that loads automatically when Windows starts up, that uses memory up as well.

My taskbar has basically no icons, my desktop is ok, not sure about the startup folder, but i'll have a look, cheers..

Maybe it's just me, but with 1.3Gb still free - I wouldn't worry ;)

Maybe it's just me, but with 1.3Gb still free - I wouldn't worry ;)

idd, about 700mb used is normal for a 2GB machine, XP will eat more if theres more available, I have 3GB, and on boot i only have 2.1GB free (thats eating 900mb) that was on XP, on vista now I have 2.3 GB free on boot ( go figure, Vista using less than XP, on boot)

missread the above used figures sorry.thought u were saying 1.3 used.my mistake.
mine has 2 gig using aprox 25% with vista

RAM Idle is a good little utility, not sure if it actually makes a difference but it lets you see your free ram in your system tray. can be configured to free up chunks of ram every so often! freeware too

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Memory-Tweak/RAM-Idle-LE.shtml

sure he dont mean hard drive space?
cos using all that much up by just running plain vanilla xp and 2 IEs????

i only have 256mb ram and have 5-7 things running at once daily, on xp

sure he dont mean hard drive space?
cos using all that much up by just running plain vanilla xp and 2 IEs????

i only have 256mb ram and have 5-7 things running at once daily, on xp

yeah, but the more ram you have, the more XP will use, -- you probably have more swap file in use than he does....

dont get started on page file, that just brings up the whole, "is it necessary with the vast amounts of RAM people have" debate....

Any ideas anyone?........

Open up task manager, go to processes tab. Tick the box to view processes from all users, Click mem usage a couple of times to order by highest memory to lowest, then stick the names of the proceses in google one by one to see what they are. Kill off anything you don't need.

Also worth checking something like this - http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm

to see if you have any services running that you don't need.

dont get started on page file, that just brings up the whole, "is it necessary with the vast amounts of RAM people have" debate....

Is there a debate. Last time I checked physical ram is on the order of thousands of times faster than a disk.

overclockers agree with you, but from a fundemental point of veiw you still need page file, the implications of running out of physical RAM mean a fairly spectacular system crash!

Definitely, I have as much physical RAM as I thought practically possible and 1.5 times that much swap space on a fast drive. In theory the computer shouldn't need the swap space very often (if ever).
Running out of physical ram wouldn't cause a spectacular crash though, it would just cause some application to be denied requested memory, which in theory shouldn't even crash that application (though it might). Windows itself should never run out of memory as it's in charge of allocating it.
It might make for an unusable system, but not a horrible crash.

if windows is unable to allocate anything swap or RAM ithas a paddy

Probably, it is written by micro$oft.

I have 2GB memory in my computer, there is only 1.3GB free so my pc seems to be chewing up alot, this is with only 2 internet explorer pages open..

Any ideas anyone?........

get this program it will free up memory as you use it it also has a load ov other things on to speed up your pc (IM SURE YOU COULD GET IT FOR FREE SOMEWHERE ):hihi: i use it .

http://www.tune-up.com/products/tuneup-utilities/