Thinkpads Forum

Hi everybody,

I was tweaking my T60 (2623-D3U with 1 GB of RAM) and came to startup oprimization. Currently, when my systems boots up completely, it consumes about 253 MB of RAM.

I was wondering how much memory usage you guys have after a full system restart?

Thanks,
Hamid

~400MB on my T40

yep, 253mb here. does that seem high? I've forgotten the number from my T43.

Have you guys installed any special applications that run on startup?

400MB on startup is just sooooo much for me!

My systems use about 250Mb on startup. That will grow as things get cached, and fall as FreeMem Pro reclaims memory. Memory hogs like Copy (you heard me) or VMware use a lot of memory that gets release when they finish or are closed. ... JD Hurst

well, mine is a pretty old install and that was after it had been up for ~20 mins.

ive got AV starting up, RMclock, printers, aim, msn, daemon, steam and a slew of other crap. It doesnt slow it down and i never restart (i hibernate) so it doenst bother me in the least.

What number are people reporting here? The Page File Usage? Or the System Cache, under Physical Memory, in the Task Manager?

I use the number provided by FreeMem Pro. ... JD Hurst

When I had my T23 running W2K SP4 with minimal services, e.g. no Norton, no Windows update, you know the usual junk, but did have stuff like Access Connections, the startup RAM was about 79MB. It was a mean clean machine, and nothing like the 366MB that my T60 is chewing up as reported under task manager.

I miss the good ol days.

My system as shipped (200762U) used 270Mb at startup (I'm reporting the number under "System Cache" in "Physical Memory" in the Task Manager). Then I spent a lot of time tweaking startup processes and services and I got it down to about 205mb. Then I added the Kerio firewall and Avast Anti-Virus and this bumped it up to 230Mb.

Now, after using the notebook for a while, when I start up it tends to be around 330Mb. I'm not sure why it slowly inched up. There are no new start up processes running. Does Windows just take more memory for it's cache once it's figured out what one's usual uses of the system are?

How can I tell specifically how all of the memory is being employed? If I add up all the running processes shown, that only accounts for about 200Mb of the RAM in use by the System Cache.

donking! wrote:My system as shipped (200762U) used 270Mb at startup (I'm reporting the number under "System Cache" in "Physical Memory" in the Task Manager). Then I spent a lot of time tweaking startup processes and services and I got it down to about 205mb. Then I added the Kerio firewall and Avast Anti-Virus and this bumped it up to 230Mb.

Now, after using the notebook for a while, when I start up it tends to be around 330Mb. I'm not sure why it slowly inched up. There are no new start up processes running. Does Windows just take more memory for it's cache once it's figured out what one's usual uses of the system are?

How can I tell specifically how all of the memory is being employed? If I add up all the running processes shown, that only accounts for about 200Mb of the RAM in use by the System Cache.

Interesting; of all things, Windows should actually decrease the amount of RAM it uses for system services up login. Whenever XP starts up, it takes a look at what drivers and services you have most often used in the past and pre-caches them whilst it boots. If anything, that should decrease the amount of RAM and time that is spent looking for the right files for a given service to start.

The only way I can see an increase taking place is if software is being installed and used alot when it is "young" and then the computer is rebooted, more software, repeat. That would make Windows initially load, because it sees so much stuff that may request things to be configured by the time the login rolls around, that it simply goes ahead and loads it all up anyway. Although that would also have to affect the boot times somewhat. Have your boot times changed much recently?

Yeah, I guess my startup times having gotten longer. I hadn't noticed, but I just timed it.

After I'd done all of my tweaking and removing of startup processes, I had a startup time of about 60 seconds. Now it's about 80 seconds.

I haven't installed that much software. Although, what you describe is sort of what I did. I installed all the Windows and ThinkPad updates, did all my startup tweaks and removed software that shipped with the T60 that I didn't want, then installed the apps I do want (firewall, virus, ooo writer, photoshop, indesign, a couple spyware things). There were definitely a lot of reboots between installing applications, because I was making backup images and checking for any startup processes that new applications had installed, so I could remove or disable them.

Actually, maybe my increased RAM use and startup time has to do with Daemon tools? I've got that setup for two virtual drives that automatically mount two images at startup. Could that alone add 20 seconds to the startup time and take up the RAM?

Any way to see a list of what is loading up into RAM at startup?

Has anyone used cachemanxp or cachemen 5 to manage their RAM? or some like program ...

is it a good idea, a bad idea, a waste of time and a few more Megs of RAM ...

Thanks for the replies. I guess the ThinPad Applications consume some RAM (My firend boots his Laptop with WinXP - 146 MB mem usage).

Personally, I don't like any memory management applications since I prefer the OS kernel to take care of that. Actually I have bad experiences with these applications in the past. Don't recommend them.

donking! wrote:Yeah, I guess my startup times having gotten longer. I hadn't noticed, but I just timed it.

After I'd done all of my tweaking and removing of startup processes, I had a startup time of about 60 seconds. Now it's about 80 seconds.

I haven't installed that much software. Although, what you describe is sort of what I did. I installed all the Windows and ThinkPad updates, did all my startup tweaks and removed software that shipped with the T60 that I didn't want, then installed the apps I do want (firewall, virus, ooo writer, photoshop, indesign, a couple spyware things). There were definitely a lot of reboots between installing applications, because I was making backup images and checking for any startup processes that new applications had installed, so I could remove or disable them.

Actually, maybe my increased RAM use and startup time has to do with Daemon tools? I've got that setup for two virtual drives that automatically mount two images at startup. Could that alone add 20 seconds to the startup time and take up the RAM?

Any way to see a list of what is loading up into RAM at startup?

BootVis would probably be your best bet, might also want to look at some form of a process explorer from SysInternals. CCleaner also gives you a good view of startup processes as well as the tools to remove that and more, though it doesn't show how much RAM is used at startup/login.

christopher_wolf wrote:BootVis would probably be your best bet, might also want to look at some form of a process explorer from SysInternals. CCleaner also gives you a good view of startup processes as well as the tools to remove that and more, though it doesn't show how much RAM is used at startup/login.

As I said above, I already spent a great deal of time tweaking the startup processes and services on my T60. I've worked with SysInternals programs, CCleaner, and other software platforms to do this.

I don't think all the extra RAM being used on my system comes from random startup processes that I don't want. It seems like instead, as I said, something is suddenly taking up a lot of extra RAM.

The SysInternals platforms and those programs don't show specifically how all of the RAM is being allocated (or at least I don't see any applications there that do this). The Task Manager doesn't either. As I said, if I add up the RAM shown for all the running processes shown, it only amounts to 200Mb of 330Mb in use.

Bootvis didn't turn out to be a good idea. It didn't give me hardly any information about what processes are loaded. It doesn't say how the RAM is allocated. And when I ran the optimization feature, it caused my notebook to start freezing on startup about every other time. So I had to do a recovery from one of my Acronis images.

Any other ideas where all my RAM is going?