The case of the disappearing memory

[Bert Latamore]

I am constantly fighting to keep a decent amount of the memory in my UX free for running programs, and it looks like a losing battle. And I do not understand what is going on.

The other week I went through the sold-state disk on my UX pretty thoroughly and, through a combination of moving selected applications to the 8 GB memory card I now have and deleting a couple of things that had come with the UX and that I didn't want, I managed to bring the amount of free memory (remember this is a solid state machine with nothing to distinguish "memory" from "storage") up from less than 3 GB to 5.4 GB. I thought I had solved the problem.

Since then I have not installed anything new, I have not added any major documents or files, and yet today I discovered that I had 2.7 GB of free memory. I have run AdAware and CCleaner (and I should add that I have AVG 8.0 running continuously onthe UX, supposedly blocking things like spyware). After running those I seem to have raised my free memory up to 2.8 GB. But I do not have any idea of where the other 2 GB of free memory went to, or what to do about it. Do I keep moving things to the memory card? And what happens when I run out of things to move and my free memory continues to disappear like this?

I do notice that I have two huge text files on my C drive, one labeled "HuskyInstallerLog" (1,209 KB) and the other "instlog" (2,101 KB). I suspect that I do not need either and can delete them, but I would like confirmation of that before I do anything. But that certainly won't give me back the 2+ GB of memory that has gotten filled up with something.

So I certainly would appreciate any ideas on what I should do.

Thanks,

Bert

--
Bert Latamore
IT Industry Freelance Writer
ComputerWorld Online blogger

[BigNosed UglyGuy]

Bert

Google throws up a lot of queries like yours - but no definitive answer.  One Palm Forum posts mentions i) automotive and flooring products called Husky and ii) a SourceForge developer project.  Any of these ring a bell?

Buzz

2008/8/13 Bert Latamore <bert.l...@gmail.com>

--
bignoseduglyguy
http://www.bignoseduglyguy.com

[Bert Latamore]

Buzz,

No. Never heard of them.

Bert

[Brenda Wallace]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 7:45 AM, Bert Latamore <bert.l...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Since then I have not installed anything new, I have not added any major
> documents or files, and yet today I discovered that I had 2.7 GB of free
> memory. I have run AdAware and CCleaner (and I should add that I have AVG
> 8.0 running continuously onthe UX, supposedly blocking things like spyware).
> After running those I seem to have raised my free memory up to 2.8 GB. But I
> do not have any idea of where the other 2 GB of free memory went to, or what
> to do about it. Do I keep moving things to the memory card? And what happens
> when I run out of things to move and my free memory continues to disappear
> like this?

Are you downloading emails?

[Bert Latamore]

definitely not. I do all my emails on the server via Firefox and have for decades.

Bert

[Jesper Anderson]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 21:45, Bert Latamore <bert.l...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I do notice that I have two huge text files on my C drive, one labeled
> "HuskyInstallerLog" (1,209 KB) and the other "instlog" (2,101 KB). I suspect
> that I do not need either and can delete them, but I would like confirmation
> of that before I do anything. But that certainly won't give me back the 2+
> GB of memory that has gotten filled up with something.

If they're text files you can safely delete them, or replace them with
empty files. You can also set the empty files to write protected and
see if any application gets annoyed at that. Usually that works well.

Apart from that; what is your pagefile setting? It may have grown
automatically to eat up some memory. Windows likes to do that even
when it's not necessary.

There may also be temporary internet files and general temp files
around. The built in WIndows free up memory on hard disks thingy does
a decent job of cleaning that up. Also look in the Firefox cache
directory; it may be eating up lots of space, although it shouldn't
eat gigabytes like that.

Jesper

[Bert Latamore]

Jesper,

Thanks. What is a pagefile setting and where do I find it?

Bert

[Jesper Anderson]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 13:04, Bert Latamore <bert.l...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks. What is a pagefile setting and where do I find it?

It is the virtual memory file which Windows uses when the physical
memory runs low. In XP you can find the setting for it in Control
Panel -> System and then, I think, Advanced or Performance or some
such. IIRC they kept changing it with different OEM versions and
service packs, and my Windows machine is dead right now so I can't
check on it.

It should be called pagefile, virtual memory or something like that. A
good setting for a system like yours should be to set it at
1024-1024MB (or maybe 2048-2048 if it's set near that as min now),
that is the same min and max size so it doesn't grow or shrink. That
will also improve performance slightly. If you run low on memory at
that setting, try to increase it, but always same min and max value.

I did a quick google but couldn't find anything mentioning where the
pagefile is altered in Vista, so I would suspect it's in the same
place as in XP.

Jesper

[Bert Latamore]

Jesper,

The paging setting is 1313 MB. So that doesn't seem to be a problem. Thanks for the information!

Bert