mem issue

[Getwyred]

My computer was running great but now seems to bog down easily it has 1 gig of ram but after start up it only has about 300mb of useable ram is there anything I can check for I am a novice when comes to registry and bios stuff I do have hijackthis maybe that could help you guys. Thanks

[bobbyraw]

is this a mac or windows computer.

[Getwyred]

is this a mac or windows computer.

windows

[bobbyraw]

right mouse click on the my computer icon on your desktop, choose properties and it will tell you how much ram on the pc

NB if you install 1G of mem and it shows less, you might have some alocated to video memory in the buios especially if you are using an onboard vga

[madoverclocker]

if you are using on-board vga then a dedicated gpu will really free things up. are you using xp or vista?

[Getwyred]

xp

[bobbyraw]

what is a GPU????

[Getwyred]

wondering same thing

[madoverclocker]

graphics processing unit

geek speek for video card, if you don't do any gaming an inexpensive card like nvidia's 8600gt will do a lot of good for about $130.

but, xp really isn't a mem hog like vista... if your system is using 700megs of ram idling then you must have A LOT of programs running in the backround. use task manager to check what programs are running at idle, you may want to delete/disable some of them.

[Getwyred]

not sure which ones are safe to delete or disable

[bobbyraw]

you can't deleted from taks manager any way. you would have to check in msconfig or the registry to remove some of the programs that are astrting up with windows. you can simple remove them there.