Once my pc has booted up I notice that I only have about 7mb of free ram. The only programs I have running at start up are as follows:- PowerProfile x2 scanreg systray Kb891711 (win update) and Zone Alarm Both PowerProfiles and the win update only take up about 4mb, which is not very much. Even when I disable Zone Alarm to run at start up, 91 mb of ram is being used. This seems very high considering only essential programs are loaded up. Is this normal? ps. I have ran Ad-aware and Spybot, anti-virus, scandisc, and defrag. I'd rather get to the bottom of this before thinking about upgrading ram.

Yes this is normal. Windows will use as much memory as it can get its hands on on the principal that unused RAM is a waste. The amount of free RAM is no indication of what is actually being used. Stuff will be left in memory although it might not be in current use on the chance that it might be needed again, which it often is. Windows will free up unused RAM as required. It takes a few milli seconds to free up a block of memory while it can take a few seconds to load something from disk. Third party memory managers free up this allocated but unused RAM in the mistaken belief that free ram speeds up the computer. It doesn't and it can actually slow things down. If you upgrade your RAM to 256 Mbs you will still find that around 200 Mgbs is allocated but it will speed things up as bit. Stuart

scan for spyware? Run MSCONFIG to check for suspicious programs loading at startup? ASUS A7N8X-X Athlon XP 1800+ 8.5 x 200MHz 1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro SP2

Thank for the reply. I seem to be getting alot of page filling though. Once the pc has booted up, I open up a program and I notice alot of activity on the hard disk. If suffient ram was being freed up I wouldn't notice as much page filling. Or would I? Those are my thoughts - feel free to make any sugestions. Here is some backgroung information as to what led me to thinking I had an issue with ram or cpu usage in the first place. I notice the cpu reguarly hits 100% while I am surfing the web. Sometimes the system stalls so much that the clock is behind by as much as 20 mins. Web pages also take longer to load up - the incoming data is very quick but the pc can't seem to process it quickly enough. When I open AOL, for example, I get alot of hard disk activity and it can take a long time to open.

Excellent post by Stuart. Follow Jams advice and scan for spyware. Click the: 'Click here for some useful security tools.' link near the top of the main page for help.

Ok, I think i have more of an idea of whats happening. I basicly only open two programs, AOL and Zone Alarm. AOL requires a minimum of 64mb ram and Zone Alarm 48mb. This only leaves around 16mb of memory to perform all other tasks, which is probably why I am seeing alot of page fileing and overall poor system perfomance. I think it's time to upgrade my memory. Thanks for all your comments.