availible physical memory half of total whats happenig?

[justime8]

ok I do not know if this is a problem or not but here it is. I have a gig of ram (physical memory?) but only have 590 mb available. I have no idea how to find out what is hogging my ram or how to stop it.(Yet !) I do have autoruns and process explorer and they do not show any programs did not know that I have running. I think I need more info. thanks for taking the time to read my post! Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[ndmmxiaomayi]

XP or Vista?

For either, try this:

For XP

Right click on My Computer and select Properties.

On the first tab, it will show how much RAM you have.

For Vista

Click on the Start Menu and right click on Computer and select Properties.

Under System, it will show how much RAM you have.

[justime8]

OK here it is
I have XP pro 2002 service pack 2 compaq pentium(R) 4 2.0GHz 1.99GHz, 1.00 GB of ram

[justime8]

ok this is what I was talking about in my first post

[ndmmxiaomayi]

Process Explorer should be able to tell you how much memory each process is taking up.

[justime8]

I am not sure which column tells me that ... page faults?

[Tom.K]

It should be something like Memory Usage.
Windows Task Manager can show Memory usage, too.
When you open Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete), go to Tab "Processes".In attachment you can see the column Mem Usage.

[md usa spybot fan]

justime8:

If you go into Windows Task Manager as suggested by Tom.K, I suggest that you also go into the Performance tab. There is an item there list as "System Cache" which is not necessarily listed elsewhere.

The "System Cache" shows the current physical memory used to map pages of open files. In other words, the physical memory being used by the system to handle I/O. The amount of memory used for "System Cache" is usually a significant amount, but that is what speeds up your system by buffering the I/O from relatively slow (compared to the CPU and memory) speed I/O devices.