Windows not using all RAM even though no limit?

The bottom photo is a picture of all my specs and what I am running (Windows 8, 64-bit, 8GB Ram, 2.50GHz, ect, ect. My laptop model is a ASUS R500A with Windows 8 pre-installed, clean. This laptop is a month old and only use it for media).

The picture on the left is a photo of my Task manager while its rendering the video. I can see the CPU is going above its limit even though I have not made any modification to my systems settings but the RAM is not being completely used? It also says 5.1GB Available, 3.0/9.1GB commited? (Even though i only have 8GB), and the Page Pool is low as hell when it should be higher? (If im correct)

The picture on the right is a picture of my virtual memory. I have 8GB of ram but the currently located is 1216MB when it recommends 4.5GB? I was thinking about maybe putting this to 4.5GB but im not sure what to set the Initial Size and the Maximum Size values too.

Just a suggestion. Everyone can read your enormous and colourful text, but your pictures are far from the best. Maybe if you would edit the text to something more natural (using examples from other posts is a good start) and posting larger images, it would help immensely.

Ray8 said:

Just a suggestion. Everyone can read your enormous and colourful text, but your pictures are far from the best. Maybe if you would edit the text to something more natural (using examples from other posts is a good start) and posting larger images, it would help immensely.

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Image fixed. :thumb: Thanks for the heads up!

Hi there
I think you've got a slight misconception of how an OS works. RAM (once you have over the base required for the OS and applications) isn't a major or even a bottleneck at all (unless you want to run a whole load of Virtual Machines). With 8GB RAM you should be fine but you could up that to 16GB if you want to use Virtual Machines etc.

The amount of REAL RAM being used isn't usually a bottleneck at all.

While details of paging algorithms are far too complex to go into here basically what the OS does is divide the memory into chunks called pages and it stores some data from these pages into REAL RAM for program execution. In this way real RAM can be used very efficiently and you can have a load of programs running concurrently -- even if the real RAM requirement of these is greater than that installed in the machine. Windows "learns" what data is likely to be required next via some very complex algorithms -- one common method is the "LRU" algorithm or last recently used algorithm but there are others. The OS will during a time when a program for example is performing a WRITE to DISK or waiting for keyboard or mouse input will see if it needs to load different "pages" into REAL RAM for the next application execution instructions.

If there is a REAL shortage of RAM you'll get the "Pages" being read into RAM and then written out to Disk again continuously and it's a condition called "Thrashing" -- but in your case this isn't occurring.

The real bottleneck with home computers is invariably the Disk I/O system -- It's really amazing how many people STILL don't understand this and often update the processor or add crazily huge amounts of RAM into the system and then are disappointed when the system fails to perform with the improvement expected.

Disks should if they are spinners have the fastest RPM that it's possible to have and have a HUGE cache too if possible. How Disk I/O works again is a bit beyond the scope of these threads but with a large Disk cache the Disk I/O subsystem can also store data "it thinks you want to use next" while the CPU is performing other instructions --overlapping Disk with processor speed.

The best improvement that you could do to your system would be to install an SSD certainly for the OS and if your budget can run to it SSD's for other applications as well.

Now I have a small Acer aspire 11 inch laptop with only an i3 processor in it with 8GB RAM but an SSD and the WEI figure is not much less than yours.

The lowest score on mine was 5.2 --that was the processor (i3). My SSD gave me data transfer rate of 8.5, 3d Graphics 6.1, graphics in general 5.7 -- remember this is only a relatively low powered cheap laptop --but it just FLIES for me compared with a higher powered desktop with only spinners in it.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Cheers
jimbo

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So what your trying to say is that I was expecting my computer to run faster with the 8GB of ram but it actually wont? How can i get it to render faster? what is a SSD? Should i upgrade my Graphics card or something? I think its only 512mb.. I think. Its just i baught this laptop thinking it was going to be good for everything media and it is good except for video rendering.:huh: