Memory management

Anybody have any suggestions for memory management? I am running a program called femlab that needs large blocks of memory. The user manual says that I may get out of memory errors (which I do) because windows fragments the memory so that while my total free memory is sufficient to run the ap, no one piece of free memory is large enough, hence the error. Any one know if: 1 I can tell windows to quit fragging the memory space, or 2 Is there a program that will do the same thing? Thanks so much.

Oh yes, I am running winXP Pro, w/ 512MB RAM and 2-3GB Virtual Memory.

 

I don't think I would waste money on such a program if it even exists. If your program femlab requires lots of memory, I would just buy some more as 512MB is not that much if this is a big program. Also go over to the hardware forum here and read my article on notebook optimizing for speed and get rid of any extra junk running in the background that you don't need. If femlab does need quite a bit of memory, it is probably having to go out to your pagefile and it maybe fragmented(try using diskkeeper 8.0 to defrag the pagefile). I think if you get 1GB of memory and reduce the size of your virtual memory to 1GB or less as well as set the virtual memory to a custom size of your choosing(don't let the system manage it as this will cause it to grow and shrink and become fragmented again)

I said to try reducing the virtual memory after adding more real memory because 2-3GB is a rediculasly large amount, at most only set it to 2X the amount of real memory and only 1 to 1.5X at most for real memory sizes greater than 512KB.

good luck
Jack

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill

 

Bootleg, Thanks for the suggestions. I did have all extraneous services/aps closed down. The program goes to the page file immediately. It eats a couple hundred of physical ram, and then uses 1-3GB of virtual, according to task manager. I had the virtual memory set so large because that's how big it got when I was running my model and letting windows manage the size. I am afraid more RAM is out of the question. I haven't the $ and my wife sure wouldn't go for me upgrading my "new" laptop already. I have time, just not $- joys of graduate school. I wish I had known I would be using this program before I bought my machine

 

CachemanXP is a good program that you could check out. It alows you to manually free memory up or to have it at set levels to automatically try to reclaim some.

zx5000 :: 2.4M :: 512 DDR :: 40gb 4200 RPM HD :: 15.4" :: Radeon 9600 Mobilty M10 :: Aquamark3 22,856

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by noahsark