freeing up ram

[Calvin Walley]

how can I SAFELY free up ram ?
sandy play's a LOT of online games and the computer has went from lightning fast to a snails pace
I checked and the memory (3 GB ) is nearly full what should I do ? (using win 7 )

[Wiz Feinberg]

Change to a SSD boot drive, or add the SSD as a secondary drive and move the swap file to it, or else add a SSD cache module from Crucial (see my RAM page at www.wizcrafts.net/ram.html for details).

Add one more gig of matching RAM.

[Calvin Walley]

so is it stuck in ram forever ? I thought ram was a temp memory . is there no way to reduce whats already there ?

[Chris Dorch]

First off... 3gb of RAM is really not a lot. How can you find out? To be technical, if you load up Perfmon (Performance Monitor) and look at pagefile usage keys, you shouldn't have more than 10 to 20% usage especially if the system default of 1.5x the amount of physical memory is set. If you have a value that's higher, you machine is starving for more RAM. Windows manages what's in physical memory and what is in virtual memory (pagefile.sys), so no there is nothing you can do to free up memory other than reboot.

What's wrong with using the pagefile? Because disk is slow and RAM is fast. Hence why the suggestion to use SSD has been offered. If you add an SSD, you can jack up the virtual memory and hope that windows will swap like crazy. The easier and cheaper alternative is to max out the memory. The problem is that if you are using a 32-bit OS, that max is only 4GB. If you have 64-bit, then the max will be 8GB.

If you find that after you close applications that memory usage stays peaked, perhaps the application is bad and has a memory leak. This is not uncommon. Perhaps there are patches out there for whatever is installed.

You can always use the task manager and try to identify the processes that are using the lion's share of memory and kill them if you don't want to reboot. But, unless you know what you are looking at, you could just submarine your system requiring you to reboot anyway...

Hope you find something useful in here...

[Calvin Walley]

thanks to you both
i'm starting to understand a little of whats happening . I followed a link on wiz site and found that I can expand to 8 GB ram ..still don't know what ssd means ..lol

[Jim Priebe]

Calvin
It is very difficult to explain this sort of thing to the "average Joe" as you probably have no idea of the acronyms and language used in computer speak.
A SSD is a Solid State drive - as opposed to the conventional multidisk (mechanical) HDD - hard disk drive.
Your computer has quite a few memory storage areas - RAM, Virtual Memory, Cache areas and the different Hard Disk drives.
RAM is emptied at each reboot.
Virtual memory - an area reserved on a hard drive to be used as RAM (sort of but it's slower) but it doesn't empty on reboot. It also gets pretty in-efficient once it is fragmented and most defragmenter utilities don't properly fix this.
Then there's various cache areas on you HDD some of which empty, some can be manually emptied and so on.
And there's your HDD's (or SSD if you have the $$$$'s).
When your computer loads there are a myriad of processes loaded into the RAM etc. The more "bloatware" (useless things running in the background you are not even aware of) you have the more you RAM fills up.
Games and the Web in general etc. are notorious for loading all sorts of crap on to your computer and you are not even aware of it. This clogs things up, fills the registries (on a PC system) with a whole lot of (useless) instructions and so you have a slow computer.
To fix all these I will leave it to Wiz and co to suggest utilities to fix these things but from a practical point it may take a little more knowledge or experience to use these to your advantage - no offence there - it's how 99% of users are.
Hope this helps a little.

[Jack Stoner]

You say your PC is capable of 8GB of RAM. However, unless you have a 64 bit OS, you can only use a little less than 4GB (a 32 bit OS can only address a little under 4GB).

Having lots of programs open, can diminish what memory is available and cause processing to slow down (although more memory won't make the PC inherently faster - this a false idea many have).

Video is another area to consider. A slow video and small on board video can slow things down. Newer video cards with more on-board memory allow off-loading to the video card. However, upgrading to a better video card depends on the PC hardware and power supply.

Too many potential variables. Post your PC specs or PC Model and Operating System. That will allow people to respond to exactly what you have. As it is we are just talking in generalities now.

[Calvin Walley]

thanks fellas i'm starting to get it .
Jack , you asked for the pc specs they are as follows :

processor : ADM e1-1200 APU WITH TRADEOM (TM) HD
memory (ram): 4 GB
graphics : AMD radeon HD7310 graphics
gaming graphics: 1961 MB total available graphics memory
mfg: HP
model :p2-1122
system type :64 bit operating system
number of cores :2
total size of hard disc :466GB
disc partition (c):380 GB free (449 GB total )
disc partition (D): 17 GB free ( 17 GB total)
media drive (E): cd/DVD
DISPLAY ADAPTER TYPE : AMD radeonHD7310 graphics
total available graphics memory :1961 MB
dedicated graphics memory: 384 MB
dedicated system memory : 0
shared system memory : 1577 MB

direct X version : direct X 10

I should note that after rebooting , it did help some ..thanks again

[Jack Stoner]

That PC should run multi-tasking pretty good. It is a 64 bit OS system. Upgrading memory may help some but its not a cure all. Video is good for most games, too.

On line games could be the communications link (the link to the internet or even the gaming server) and not the PC. If local games (on the PC) or applications run OK, the link or web could very well be the problem.

[Calvin Walley]

thanks to all of you , I guess it really does help for you to have all the information !!!...lol