I was playing a game of solitaire the other night and it slowed right down. I checked Norton System Doctor and it reported physical memory as 0.0Mb. I only had System Doctor and Spider Solitaire running - Oh, and 256Mb RAM on board! Here are the details in case anyone can help track down my missing memory. It's an Evesham machine with a Chaintech CT-6BTA3 motherboard, Pentium PIII 450MHz and 256Mb RAM (reported as 262144K by POST), Vodoo 3 3000 16Mb graphics card and Award BIOS, running Windows ME. Tonight System Doctor reports 60.8 physical memory available and System Information reports 80.3 used, making 141.1 in all, where's my other 114.9 Mb gone? MEMORY USE, as reported by System Information: Windows 32 - 20.3,Windows 16 - 13.3, Realplay.exe - 10.2, MSOffice.exe - 10, Findfast.exe - 7.34, POPROXY.exe - 6.97, Sysdoc32.exe - 6.45, SI32.exe - 5.6, Device Drivers - 5.11, Dunmon.exe - 5.1, Tsystray.exe - 4.86, Touchmgr.exe - 4.77, Stimon.exe - 4.43, AVGCC32.exe - 4.37, RPCSS.exe - 4.13, CSINSM32.exe - 3.82, STMGR.exe - 3.62, INSTANT ACCESS.exe - 3.6, MMUSBKB2.exe - 3.43, 3DFXMAN.exe - 2.99, POINT32.exe - 2.89, MDM.exe - 2.39, NAVAPW32.exe - 1.8, OSD.exe - 1.75, SSDPSRV.exe - 1.59, MEDIACTR.exe - 1.55, NPROTECT.exe - 1.55, MSTASK.exe - 1.25, WMIEXE.exe - 835KB, SYMTRAY.exe - 693KB, IOWATCH.exe - 634KB, IMGICON.exe - 578KB, ACROTRAY.exe - 467KB, 13-bit Libs - 409KB, CSINJECT.exe - 197KB, TASKMON.exe - 163KB, AVGSERV9.exe - 20KB, Cleansweep WOW SMART SWEEP - 19.8KB, TEXTBRIDGE INSTANT ACCESS - .81KB

You have a ton of stuff running. Disable MSOffice and Findfast from running. Findfast will slow your system down. Also, full time virus protection will do the same. You can leave proproxy as NAV uses it to protect your email but don't let NAV stay loaded. Same goes with realplayer. Practically nothing should be running at startup.

i would trash norton if i were you that program sucks , only norton i would put on my box is n. virus

Ok, thanks for suggestions, will try them and report back. Doesn't explain why the maths doesn't add up, though. Any ideas?

The way I understand it is that right off the bat, half of your memory goes straight to windows to allow windows to access the other half. This part of the memory is segmented. Once windows system resources in any one of these segments have been exceeded, you get the "Out of Memory" error. It doesn't matter if you have 150MB of memory left, basically what you have done is to exceed windows ability to address it. The small programs you listed take as many resources as the bigger ones. (The advantage of more memory is that you can run more large programs simultaneously)

I was having a similiar problem with some of my game programs. Running very slowly or not at all. Upon checking through system monitor, I noticed processor usage listed at 100% with constant hard disk activity. I used the free procview program and started terminating different programs until the processor memory was freed up. When I terminate the stmgr.exe, everything clears up and runs smoothly. The problem started occuring after updating to IE6. Hope this is helpful.