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Windows both does and doesn't see all of my RAM
kime
Queen of BladesRegistered User regular
Queen of BladesRegistered User regular
I noticed this in the past..... couple months? Ish? I was seeing slowdowns during gaming and opened up Task Manager, and noticed that it was memory-constrained, apparently!
Sometimes depending on what's running, that'll change a bit, but it roughly looks like what you see now, which is: "I have 4 GB of RAM." Never seems to add up to more than that, and you can see that Task Manager sure thinks that's the max based on the % usage calculation.
Except I don't have 4 GB, I have 8 GB. Oh no! I think it's two 4-GB sticks, maybe one went bad!
Except... Windows otherwise seems to think I've got 8 GB?
System Information:
Device Specifications:
And it is a 64-bit processor/OS:
So.... what gives? Could one of the sticks be bad or have been jostled out of position or something, but most of Windows still sees it? What other root cause could there be? I'm having trouble Googling anything, since it's not that Windows doesn't entirely see it, just can't... use it. Or something weird like that.
Edit: OK, so Task Manager is able to see 8 GB when I go into the performance tab:
No idea what's using that, though. Windows shouldn't be secretly using 2 GB of RAM, right?
Sometimes depending on what's running, that'll change a bit, but it roughly looks like what you see now, which is: "I have 4 GB of RAM." Never seems to add up to more than that, and you can see that Task Manager sure thinks that's the max based on the % usage calculation.
Except I don't have 4 GB, I have 8 GB. Oh no! I think it's two 4-GB sticks, maybe one went bad!
Except... Windows otherwise seems to think I've got 8 GB?
System Information:
Device Specifications:
And it is a 64-bit processor/OS:
So.... what gives? Could one of the sticks be bad or have been jostled out of position or something, but most of Windows still sees it? What other root cause could there be? I'm having trouble Googling anything, since it's not that Windows doesn't entirely see it, just can't... use it. Or something weird like that.
Edit: OK, so Task Manager is able to see 8 GB when I go into the performance tab:
No idea what's using that, though. Windows shouldn't be secretly using 2 GB of RAM, right?
kime on
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I think that was similar to the main Task Manager view, I'll check later.
The first screenshot, which is the main thing Task Manager shows. The small numbers don't add up to much, I did a quick estimate of them.
Eh, may just be time to buy more RAM anyways. It just seems to have suddenly gotten worse, so was hoping I could find a culprit.
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I have a dedicated graphics card. Monitors are hooked to to that, so I didn't accidentally stop using it or something
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As an example I have 16GB of memory and 35% is showing "Used" but if you add up all the processes it doesn't go more than about 3GB.
I am not entirely sure how that % is calculated though I would suspect it takes into account all services, applications and anything else "reserved" for system tasks.
Regardless, your total memory is correctly calculated and applications will utilize as much ram as they can/need and other applications may adjust (i.e. if you run a fullscreen game windows will/may free up ram from other running programs where possible).
Also yeah, 16GB of ram isn't too pricey right now and well worth it
Still curious what's using the rest of the memory, but maybe Windows just got bloated recently or something.
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To the OS, there's no good reason to have gigs of RAM sitting unused. It'll allocate it to low priority tasks like indexing and whatnot. If you fired up some other program that needed the RAM the OS would let it go to finish it's tasks some other time.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
When I have a program (a game typically) that is running slowly because of RAM constraints, the total RAM used from Task Manager stays the same. The game borrows from Chrome or whatever, but it doesn't have enough.
Something is using several gigs of RAM behind-the-scenes even when I need it. And it didn't used to be this way.
That's what I mean by bloated.
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fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
1) Run it using a local administrator account
and
2) Run it in the highest UAC privilege level available to you
IMO, the easiest way to do this is to start a parent privileged process, like Powershell or Command Prompt, and do all my admin work there.
Most of the time, if you right-click on Command Prompt, do "Run as another user" and then log in as a local admin, this satisfies both requirements 1 and 2.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah, I dunno. It's only showing ~4 GB of RAM, added up everything. Still seeing slowdowns in the game, and still seeing that I'm actually using closer to 7 GB by most everything except the main Task Manager screen. Just nothing actually adds up to that.
This may just remain a mystery haha.
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Just because a game is running slowly doesn't mean it's due to RAM constraints.
If your RAM is 82% utilized, that means the game in question is "satisified" with the amount of RAM it's chewing. If it needed more RAM, it would take it.
Generally speaking, unless you're running 99% or 100% RAM utilization, then sheer amount of RAM isn't the problem.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.