The commit charge is the cumulative amount of memory used by all of your open/running applications and processes. As you continue to use programs, the amount of memory they use may grow; an abnormal increase in memory consumption could also be indicative of a "memory leak" in a program.

If you sort the processes listed in Task Manager's Process tab by "Mem Usage" and monitor them, you should be able to determine which processes are responsible for "chewing up" your memory. Have a look at that and tell us the names of the programs which seem to be the most "piggy" in terms of memory usage.

I need help with this also explorer is running at 22,024k an dcommit charge is 203/2462 I have a gig of memory and when I start a program it goes to 100cpu any ideas?

You should really start your own threads when you have questions/problems to post here; we do ask that members not "tag" their questions on to a thread previously started by another member (regardless of how similar your problem might seem). Not only does it divert the focus of the thread away from the original poster's problem, but it also makes it less likely that you yourself will get the individual attention that you need.


That's perfectly normal.

That's normal too. You have 1 gig of physical RAM installed and what looks to be about a 1.5 gigs of virtual memory (swap file) on your hard drive, for a total of 2.462G of usable memory. The total commit charge is only 203M, which is almost exactly what my XP system is reporting right now.


Yes, that will happen; when you first start a program, the CPU will often give its full attention to that task. There is nothing unusual about this if the program's CPU usage then settles back down. If you have a program which continues to use a very large amount of your CPU even after the program is up and running, then you may have a problem. If Task Manager is showing you such a program, please give us the program's name.