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Fizban1216 Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 1:47 am
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Zugg
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Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 5:48 am   
 
Finally! At least that's one less problem. Now if I can just fix the Simutronics problem then I can go to bed.

Thanks very much for confirming that the config window is fixed now.
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Fizban1216
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Joined: 03 Feb 2007
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:11 pm   
 
Nods, I know that 256 MB RAM is garbage just hadn't bothered to buy more because I go to college in about 2 months and plan to buy a Mac Pro Notebook and dual boot it with windows XP or Vista (will depend on if Vista has the security of swiss cheese like many Windows OS's do when their first released).
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Fizban1216
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Joined: 03 Feb 2007
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2007 4:26 pm   
 
Yep, that did indeed fix the problem.
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Seb
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Joined: 14 Aug 2004
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 3:07 am   
 
Zugg wrote:
Well, one problem from this is that it says you only have 256 MB of memory. You should have at least 512 MB of memory to run Windows XP properly. My guess is that Windows is running out of memory and cannot allocate the window somehow.

...

With only 256 MB you *will* have memory troubles. You'll likely get all sorts of wierd problems that can't be reproduced.

I'm sorry but I don't agree with any of this. Windows XP does not run out of memory (provided there is enough to boot XP) until it has used all available virtual memory as well as physical memory. You should not get any memory problems on XP due to only having 256 MB of RAM. I ran my laptop for a year on XP with 256 MB of RAM with no memory problems, and several workstations in our office use XP on 256 MB.

However, I have seen problems not being able to open more than X number of windows (where X is large) on one specific graphics card, but I'm pretty sure this is due to *graphics* memory running out (and bad drivers), not RAM (as this happens on my work desktop with 1 GB of RAM).

Zugg wrote:
Windows will run a *LOT* faster with 512 MB of ram, and ram is pretty cheap these days.

I will certainly agree with this statement though. XP is too aggressive (and dumb) - Vista is supposed to be better - when it comes to swapping memory to hard disk, and increasing the RAM helps enormously, even if it doesn't look like you ever actually run out of RAM.
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Zugg
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 8:15 pm   
 
Sorry Seb, but I have had the opposite experience. With only 256 MB of RAM on one of our older laptops, I have to reboot it a lot more than a computer with 512 MB. I know virtual memory is *supposed* to work the same as system RAM, but it doesn't. Windows XP cannot store "resources" to the virtual memory. So, it's a lot like the old Windows 98 days when the system runs low on windows resources and starts crashing and behaving badly. Some software is better at handling this than others. I have particular problems with Outlook in low memory situations. So, just because you've never had problems with low memory doesn't mean that it works fine for everyone else.
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Seb
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 3:18 am   
 
Well OK then, perhaps, but I reckon memory problems on XP are a lot rarer than you think (apart from if they are caused by dodgy RAM or a dodgy hard disk). That can certainly cause problems. Are you sure that System Resources still exist on XP? I thought they weren't applicable to NT based Windows - certainly there doesn't seem to be any easy way of seeing what the utilisation is.
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 6:01 pm   
 
System Resources still exist. In Windows NT/XP they just use normal system RAM instead of using a special "heap" that was restricted in size in Windows 95/98/ME. But resources in system RAM still get locked into memory, rather than swapped to disk. This makes sense, since resources are used for things like window handles and other user interface stuff that you wouldn't want to get swapped out.

I don't really know the low-level details about how large of a block of memory gets locked. I know that memory is divided into pages, and there is a page size setting. My guess is that Windows can only lock memory on a page by page basis. But I think that's how it controls what memory can be swapped and what can't be swapped.

My guess is that the memory problems I have seen on 256MB systems are when a critical piece of memory gets swapped to disk and the application isn't designed to handle the time needed to retrieve the data and that applications can get into a lock, especially if you have multiple threads and critical sections of code, and then your critical section needs memory that should have been locked but wasn't.

At the low levels when messing with multiple threads and sections, dealing with memory locking can be complicated. So all it would take is an application that doesn't remember to lock it's memory while in a critical section to cause problems. In zMUD/CMUD I have several places when dealing with the system clipboard where I have to specifically lock and unlock memory.

So, at the high level, virtual memory sounds easy, but at the lower levels it gets complicated. There are several other columns of information available in the task manager list of processes. But I've never really looked at it to see if it tells you how much locked memory a process has allocated.

(sorry, that's really off topic for this thread...I'm rambling because we are just killing time waiting to take Chiara to the hospital)
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