PC RAM question

[pjpjpjpj]

Those of you who ever read my posts know that I know very little about the workings of a PC, so forgive my noobishness...

I recently upgraded an old laptop from 512MB RAM to 1 GB RAM. Now I am noticing that it seems to be always pegged at 100% CPU usage when I have more than one or two apps open - especially web browsing. When I open the Windows Task Manager (Windows XP Home), and click the "Processes" tab, at the bottom the CPU usage will be 100% and the "Commit charge" will be something like 600(-ish) M / 1549M.

What can I change (as in, hold my hand and walk me through the steps) to give myself more space there? I assume this is similar to the java heap deal that affects extender performance.... but I don't know what/where to change things to increase performance in non-Sage stuff (by the way, this laptop does not run Sage and is not on the Sage system).

Or is this issue caused because my old laptop can't actually handle the increased RAM and I would see faster performance if I reduced my RAM?

Someone please (be gentle and) help this noob.

[reggie14]

What process is eating up all your CPU cycles?

I think sometimes Windows doesn't change the size of your page file when you increase the amount of RAM in your computer. The page file is a sort of virtual memory for your computer. So, if you have 1 gig of actual RAM, you might have 3 gigs of "virtual RAM". Your computer will basically pretend to have 3gigs of RAM, but of course only 1 gig at a time can actually be in memory.

In any event, check your settings. I don't think that's actually your problem here, but I'm pretty I've had to manually update my page file settings after doing a RAM update. This link tells you how to do it in Windows XP.

But again, I don't think that's related to your CPU usage issue.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by reggie14

What process is eating up all your CPU cycles?

I have not had a chance to try those tips in that link you provided, but looking at the Task Manager, I can tell you that the internet explorer is far and away the largest user. When loading a page, or displaying a page that has a lot of flash-type ads, or scrolling around a page, it's at least 140,000K, sometimes over 200,000K. It's almost always when I am doing these things, that it's pegging at 100% CPU usage. The next-biggest process is "svchost.exe", steady at 28,600K, then "explorer.exe" at 24,116K. After that, nothing is bigger than 8500K, most in the 2000-6000 range.

The more I think about the way that the system is reacting, I think it's the video card. Can it suffer from being undersized/underspec'd if the system RAM is increased? How does video speed/memory relate to PC RAM?

(Again, remember, this is a separate-from-Sage laptop and has nothing to do with my sig below)

[reggie14]

140MB of RAM for Internet Explorer isn't ridiculous, particularly if you have multiple tabs open.

By any chance did you either update to Internet Explorer 8 recently, or update flash? This really sounds like a browser issue, not a RAM issue.

If anything, more RAM should make things easier on your video card. If it's a laptop, there's a really good chance it doesn't have a video card with it's own memory. So, the laptop video card just shares the system RAM.

Also, keep in mind flash can be moderately processor intensive. I have an old 1Ghz computer that gets pretty bogged down by website that have lots of flash elements. How fast is your laptop?

[wrems]

Have you tried removing the new memory and going back to your old 512 setup to see if your problem still exists?

[petereader]

You've mentioned in these posts that your concern is CPU usage. In order to check what process is actually taking up CPU cycles you will want to open up task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) and click on the "Processes" tab. There you will notice a column labeled "CPU". Click on the header of that column (where it says "CPU") so it will order each process by what percentage of CPU cycles it is taking up, with the highest at the top. What are the top processes there and what percentage does it say? I provided a screen cap here with a circle around what to click on.

You mentioned in one of your posts internet explorer and other processes using up certain K's. That is RAM usage that you are looking at. If your CPU is spiked at 100% you will want to look at what I described above.

I hope this clarifies rather than confuses. Please let me know if you need further clarification or what you find out once you do this.

Cheers and good luck

P.S The task manager in the attached pic will look a little different from yours. That is just because I'm running Vista. It should look similar enough though.