How To Analyze System Memory In Windows XP

Do you want to check the system memory in your Windows XP computer? Memory usage is perhaps the most important factor that affects system performance. One of the ways by which you become aware of a memory shortage is if your system is paging frequently. Paging is the process of moving fixed size blocks of code and data from RAM to disk using units called pages in order to free memory for other uses. 

Although some paging is acceptable because it enables the usage of more memory than actually exists, constant paging is a drain on system performance. Reducing paging will significantly improve system responsiveness. This section describes how you can determine whether your system has an adequate amount of memory and an appropriate configuration for its role, plus how to begin to analyze its paging activity.

You can monitor your system memory by adding counters to the System Monitor program to analyze the usage of memory, processor and disk subsystems. Windows Online Support site have many useful tips that can help improve your system performance.

Instructions

• Go to the Start menu and click on Run to open the Run dialog box.
• Type perfmon.msc into the text field and press the Enter key.
• This will bring up the Performance window. Go to the right hand pane of the window and right-click on it. From the popup menu, click on the option Add Counters.
• You will now get a new Add Counters window. Select the option that says, Select counters from computer. You will see a drop down box just below that option. The name of your computer will be selected by default in this box. 
• From the Performance object drop down box, select the option Memory. From the below list, select the option Available Mbytes. Click the Add button. 
• Click the Close button. 
• To check how much memory your system takes, you need to generate some activity. Go to the Start menu and click on Help and Support. Open and close Help and Support again. You should see a spike in your Memory>Pages/Sec counter. You would notice that the spike will be smaller when you access Help and Support the second time. This is because the computer had to retrieve the information from the hard disk the first time; the second time, the information was already in the memory.
• Under the Paging>%Usage counter, check to see if it is below 99%. If it is, then you are not using excessive paging.
• If the counter is above 4MB in Memory>Available Mbytes counter, it means you have sufficient RAM.

Now you know the method to check how much memory is used in your Windows XP computer. If you need further help, avail assistance through Windows Online Support or visit the Microsoft Support Center.