RAM usage under XP SP 3

[ck07]

2 GB DDR2/533. 250 GB/7200 RPM/8 MB cache/c. 23% full. Defragged recently; new attempt said "not needed." 7300 LE/512 MB.

Until about 10 days ago, Task Manager showed about 1.8 GB free when idle. Now it shows 1.4 GB and most apps load/shut down very slowly (loading save files doesn't seem affected). Much slower than other machines in the house with 0.5-1.5 GB RAM. Looked through my running processes--nothing suprising, although the total RAM allocations don't account for even a third of the 0.6 GB of RAM that is apparently allocated to something. Nothing interesting under services either. Checked my startup list; nothing unusual there either.

Most important, I have not added anything memory-resident in the meantime; I have removed a few small startup items and a couple of services.

Spybot finds nothing.

Is there a control somewhere that affects what different parts of the physical RAM is used for (besides Device Manager, that is)?

 

[leo2kp]

I've installed SP3 as well and found zero difference in performance and memory usage. Not sure what you're experiencing.

 

[qwertycopter]

Could you clarify.. did you install SP3 10 days ago and now you're experiencing this problem? If not, what did you change or install 10 days ago?

Have you tried scanning for rootkits?

 

[ck07]

Been running it two years. Don't rmember when I upgraded to SP 3. Changed nothing important recently that I'm aware of. Installed SimCity 4 (which was not running, per TM) around then and eliminated a couple of small startup items a few days later. One (ctfmon) put itself back, but uses very little RAM (per TM).

What's a rootkit?

 

[qwertycopter]

Rootkits are nasty malware that hide themselves and potentially hide viruses and trojans on your computer so that they aren't visible to antivirus programs, etc. Read about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit

Couldn't say for sure, but if you can't narrow down what's utilizing the memory, this might be a suspect.