On Sat, 19 Feb 2011 17:28:36 -0000, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:
Pretty bog standard machine here. AMD Athlon 64 processor, 2GB of single
channel DDR 160MHz memory, couple of hard drives etc. Running Windoze 7
Ultimate 64 bit (not my choice, put on there by my lad, when he built the
machine).
2GB is about the minimum I would use for Windoze 7 64 bit. If the
machine and your budget can handle it, try installing 4GB total. Also,
with twice as much RAM, it will take twice as long before it crashes.
There are a few 'background' progs running, such as a clock
synchronizer and a weather monitor, and Thunderbird as a mail client, anti
virus etc, so I guess that 35% is reasonable.
Be specific. Some mutations of Thunderbird had memory leak problem.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Testing:Memory_Usage_Problems
If your weather monitor is Weatherbug, I vaguely recall additional
memory leak problems. What program are you using for
anti-virus/spyware? Microsoft Security Essentials had a really minor
memory leak that was allegedly fixed in the latest 2.0.xxx release.
But over the course of a few
days, the amount in use creeps up and up until you reach around 90% usage
with the same background progs running, and it otherwise idling.
Classic memory leak. Some application is probably the culprit.
Monitor the memory usage and kill off running programs until you
identify the source of the memory leak. Going from 35% of 2GB to 75%
is a change of 40% of 2GB or 800MBytes change. Over a 3 day period,
that 11MBytes per hour or 183KBytes/minute. That's not a memory leak.
That's a program gone insane that should be exterminated from your
machine. You should be able to see that much memory loss visually,
using Task Manager, one of the numerous Windoze Widgets, or some
program that shows available memory.
I have
tried a number of memory 'cleaner' programs and the best I have found to
date is one called simply "CleanMem". It claims to do a genuine job of
clearing unused crap out of the memory that's been left behind, unlike other
cleaners which it says work by fooling the system in some way by filling the
memory with zeros or some such.
Memory defragmenters and cleaners don't do anything useful. Cleaning
the heap and other junk left in RAM doesn't stay around long enough
for any program to even detect misused RAM, much less doing anything
to expedite their removal.
I'm not really au fait enough with the
workings of computers to understand just what it was saying, but suffice to
say that it does seem to work better than the others I've tried.
Sigh. I once tried a RAM defrag program and was amazed at how much
available memory it was able to free. I eventually figured out what
it was doing. When it started, it would allocate a huge block of RAM
for scratch space. When it was done, it would magically free this
memory, claiming that it was salvage from program garbage collections.
Yep, it did, but the program the created the garbage was the RAM
defrag program.
But even
that one seems unable to recover the situation beyond about 75% usage. The
only way to get the memory back, and thus recover the speed of the machine,
is to do a "Restart", which is a royal pain in the arse.
I help maintain a fairly reliable Windoze 7 machine that's up and
playing SNMP network monitor:
C:\ systeminfo | find "System Up Time"
System Up Time: 13 Days, 4 Hours, 58 Minutes, 27 Seconds
(...)
Total Physical Memory: 1,980 MB
Available Physical Memory: 1,030 MB
Virtual Memory: Max Size: 2,048 MB
Virtual Memory: Available: 1,996 MB
Virtual Memory: In Use: 52 MB
Page File Location(s): C:\pagefile.sys
No sign of any memory leaks. It normally stays up longer, but
everyone has been playing with updates and revisions, so the uptime
tends to be more than about 2 weeks.
So, is this just a poor characteristic of 7 that previous versions of
Windoze didn't suffer from ?
It's probably NOT Windoze 7. It's probably some application that
you're running. Download and install Belarc Advisor (free version)
and produce (don't post) a system report. Look down the list of
installed applications for a likely culprit for producing a memory
leak.
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html
Does anyone else have a similar problem, or
have found a way to resolve it ?
No problems, but if you want reliability, I suggest Ubuntu or one of
the other Linux distributions. If you're running a fairly basic set
of applications (Web, email, word processor, spreadsheet, etc), then
Linux will be a suitable replacement. If you run a bizarre mix of
eclectic utilities and apps, stay with Windoze 7. OS/X on a Mac is
also a good substitute, but will cost about twice as much as the
equivalent PC. Retraining your son on a new operating system might
also be useful, as it will keep him occupied and out of your workspace
for a few weeks.
Not looking for a long drawn-out discussion
on this - I can live with it.
Well, if you want a one-line answer, you could at least have warned me
or supplied a one-line question. Grumble.
Just interested to see if anyone better
qualified at this sort of thing than me, has a definitive answer.
I do this kind of stuff every day. I only see broken computers. I'm
sure there are users out there that have perfectly working machines,
but I never see them. That's the curse of being in the repair/support
biz. Also, if Microsoft ever produced a reliable product, I would be
out of business. The company motto is "If this stuff worked, you
wouldn't need me". It's on my biz card and all my stationary. Nobody
has ever disagreed (or cared).
--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060
http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558