Physical memory? Scared..>>

Um i was adding a friend on my playonilne thing for FFXI, but then the entire comp crashed on me, it turned into a blue screen and it was real noisy..but before i turned it off due to nosiyness i saw something about physical memory...what does that mean?

I have 512MB of RAM, and i dont think i had too many demanding things on..besides Playonline, AIM and MSN..theres barely anything else...so..help me? I am a bit freaked by this...

EDIT: Or it could be my huge picture that listed combos in FFXI..i dont konw a picture shouldnt do that right? =/ Its big but not so big its a pain in the butt...this is my new computer too..it shouldnt be like this so soon! ack!!!! O.O;;

Well, without the exact error message, we'll never know :monster:

Large images especially bitmaps and jpegs eat memory like theres no tommorrow so print it out and just try again.

Oh and a word about blue screens, don't worry about them especially when it comes to memory as a resrat clears everything in memory, if your still worried press ctrl+alt+delete and tell us how many processes are running, or of course go out and buy some more ram, its still pritty inexpensive at the mo :D

You shouldn't ever run out of physical memory if you have 512MB, unless a program goes completely berserk. 512MB is a ton of memory. Windows makes me sad.

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Originally Posted by lionx

Um i was adding a friend on my playonilne thing for FFXI, but then the entire comp crashed on me, it turned into a blue screen and it was real noisy..but before i turned it off due to nosiyness i saw something about physical memory...what does that mean?

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You got a Blue Screen of Death and windows was performing a physical memory dump.

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You shouldn't ever run out of physical memory if you have 512MB, unless a program goes completely berserk. 512MB is a ton of memory. Windows makes me sad.

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With some normal software, it is easy to go over 512MB and it is not a fault of windows necessarily.

I have a gig of ram and sometimes it goes as low as 100 MB free. That should never happen. It happens WHEN I run bittorrent files for files that are several gigs, and the program 'checks' whatever is downloaded so it knows what to get.

However when it is done, the used memory is either not flushed, or isn't supposed to be flushed. I have to do it manually using some mem manager program. This is either a fault with Windows, or a fault with the program (Because some BT programs can check large files without occupying RAM like it's guzzling water).

Since when does a program actively need 700 megs of memory? That's bad programming any way you put it :D

Then i dont understand..having like a jpg thats a bit huge and also playonline which is not used til i added the friend,so not alot of memory, and MSN and AIM on...i dont know...nothing else should be running actively and all i was doing was adding a friend on my list and bam blue screen...=/

ShlupMoo: I suggest trying a different BT client if your current one is giving issues. I find Azureus is pretty good, altohugh being Java based, I find it's using around 70 MB when running maybe 500 MB worth of torrents. I've only had Azureus go berserk with eating memory when I had another process doing heavy disk work, so Azureus couldn't flush to disk fast enough, so I ended up with a few hundred MB used. It was nice to see how fast that cleared though when the other process stopped, since it looked like it just did a few hundred MB in a seconds on percent complete bar :p


As for a program needing 700 MB active at one time, a large heavily used database could do it, or complex simulations or modelling :p Or virtual PCs, I'd rather they have all their virtual RAM allocated in real RAM, since they're slow enough as it is without the extra overhead of the host OS swapping memory about all the time :p

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Originally Posted by Farah

As for a program needing 700 MB active at one time, a large heavily used database could do it, or complex simulations or modelling :p Or virtual PCs, I'd rather they have all their virtual RAM allocated in real RAM, since they're slow enough as it is without the extra overhead of the host OS swapping memory about all the time :p

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FF11 does use complex enviroment mapping when run in high res mode so I think Archies cracked it, try running in low res mode :P

I'm talking industrial strength stuff, not common games (yet, anyway :p ) Besides, a PS2 doesn't have near to 1 GB of RAM :p

Does anyone remember how just 10 years ago or so, we could run quite happily on a computer with 4MB of RAM? And it did pretty much everything our modern computers do, and often just as fast? Our desktop machines right now are way, way faster than even the fastest web server from a few years ago. Hardware gets better and better, and software gets suckier and suckier.

According to one of my professors (and this was two years ago, so this statement is even outdated), the computer each of us has on our desks has more computing power than every single computer in the entire world in 1970 (or so) combined.

Wow, your custom title kinda says it all.

Anyway...modern games, like the system blowing ones (Doom 3, Farcry), can and likely will use up all that RAM, especially if you have other programs running in the background, which you likely do. And since you got BSoDed, I'm guessing you're running 98 or pre-XP, in which case it's no big deal. 98 is screwy like that.

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Originally Posted by Dr Unne

Does anyone remember how just 10 years ago or so, we could run quite happily on a computer with 4MB of RAM?

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Yup, sure do. :D

I remember when I envied my Dad's computer with its 8MB of RAM.

Actually i am using XP Home, and POL i think made it crash..not FFXI itself. The playonline viewer, if you dont know what that is..think of a souped up Battle.net or something. Well..this wont affect my computer will it? How do i fix it if it happens? Any potential danger? Preventions? ><