task manager
 

81 processes,0% cpu and 73% physical memory.

Is this normal on a new laptop and if not what to do to fix.


Ps what is physical memory anyway?

Thanks in advance

Quite normal.

Mine's currently sat at 90 processes, 3% CPU, and 73% physical memory, and it's a few years old.

Physical memory is the stuff you can open the computer up and point at. As opposed to e.g. hard drive space used as swapfile. Incidentally, you don't mention the operating system you're using, or the amount of physical memory installed in your laptop either (so the 'quite normal' above is a provisional reply :})

Anyway, if you have a brand new laptop, ensure you remove most of the bundled free crap and only install what you want.

HTH.
Mike.

The figures can be misleading. Use the Performance Monitor to actually see how the figures vary with a view to getting a feel for the baseline performance figures.

Snapshot views can be low or high depending on what the machine is doing at the time. Starting a new process for example always skews the figures.

Cron.

Sorry been out of contact

Windoze 7 starter
Apparently i have 1024MB of physical memory (i think)

With 'starter' it should be a netbook we're talking about rather than a laptop, correct?

If so, whilst 1gb isn't ideal, 'starter' can only handle 2gb in total anyway. The first thing i'd do (after confirming that you're using a netbook) is establish how much it'd cost to add 1gb more ram in that netbook, if you find it slow* at any point.


(*slower than a netbook's likely to be anyway)

Eighty-one processes seems high, although I don't recall what the baseline is on a fresh install of Windows 7. About 30 processes is typical on Windows XP. Many of the processes may be junk software preinstalled on the machine.

The CPU figure indicates that none of the processes is using any significant CPU power, which is good.

Physical memory is the actual electronic memory installed in the machine. It is contrasted with virtual memory, which is a much larger memory space that doesn't entirely exist at one time. Virtual memory is dynamically mapped to physical memory on an as-needed basis.

For example, if a program requires ten gigabytes of memory, and there are only two gigabytes of physical memory on the machine, the required ten gigabytes will be mapped into virtual address space, and will be allocated backing store (a big disk file). As the program touches various parts of the virtual memory space, if those parts are not already mapped to some location in physical memory, the program will be suspended, the required area of virtual memory will be copied from backing store on disk to some location in physical memory, and execution of the program will be resumed. The program thinks it has 10 gigabytes of memory, even though the computer is only really equipped with 2 gigabytes of physical memory.

It's normal for virtually all of physical memory to be in use. The operating system tries to keep physical memory as busy as possible. It will periodically move memory pages out of physical memory and onto backing store, and vice versa, on an as-needed basis as different programs touch their virtual memory spaces. The net effect is that programs can reference far larger memory spaces than are actually available in the physical memory of the machine, transparently and with only a small effect on overall performance.

yes i believe they call it a netbook-sorry typo.
to me if it isnt a PC then its a lappy cause its portable...

Many thanks for the explainations anyway on pysical memory..

The main reason i asked was my XP home edition machine is running with
only 28 apps so a big differance to my unknowlagable eyes..

Iwill see if i can delete some of the "crap" that now comes preloaded
although last time i did that a recovery to factory default was nesc
Thankyou for recovery sections :O

PS-machine only cost $289 so i thinks installing more memory just an't worth it..

Cheers

Although the memory usage you've shown is somewhat normal I think you might be able to pare that down a bit by checking to see if Windows Media Player sharing is turned on. It is turned ON by default. (A big glutton for system resources.)

Fire up Windows Media Player and then click on the arrow located below the Library tab. Now click Media Sharing.

In the Media Sharing dialog box, deselect the Share my media check box.

That should free up some available RAM for you.

That sounds fine for XP. I haven't made an inventory of all the junk added in Windows 7, but I'm sure the minimum process count is substantially higher.

Take a backup first. I prefer Acronis TrueImage, but I guess Norton Ghost is roughly equivalent. With a disk-image backup you can be back up and running in a few minutes even if you mess things up royally.

Memory is one of the cheapest ways to improve performance. But just because you have a boatload of mystery processes in execution doesn't mean that you're necessarily short of physical memory. As long as they are not all fighting for a dispatch or memory allocation at once, what you have now might be fine.

Not really, my basic stuff on W7 pro is 31 and another 20 for the non essential programs I'm running.