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>>>>> "rd" == Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com> writes: >>> My notebook, with a somewhat smaller set of "extras" loaded at >>> bootup and 24 MB of physical RAM, says it has about 87% of the RAM used >>> up--about 21 MB used up front upon startup." rd> Worrying about such a situation is a hold over from working with junk rd> operating systems without virtual memory. In general one expects all the rd> RAM you have to be used up all the time, except perhaps at startup rd> time before you have done anything (as in this case). In any decent rd> operating system, stuff stays around in memory and is only evicted rd> if necessary. rd> The Norton utility generally provides completely meaningless figures. It rd> is a hold over from DOS days. Not exactly. The question is how much of the *physical* memory is used versus swapping to disk. Physical memory -- especially in notebooks with slow disks -- is much faster than paged memory. If you can keep most of your work in RAM instead of swap, everything will be faster. You can tell how much of physical memory is used, and this is what Norton is telling you. How much physical memory is loaded when you start the OS. For example, on this machine (a Cyrix P166+ with 64MB of RAM running Linux), the "top" command says I'm using 61464K of physical memory, 0K of swap (I'm running three copies of Netscape at the moment!). This is a perfectly valid measurement of memory use. Cheers, ssh -- Steve Hultquist, Founder Engineering the future Worldwide Solutions, Inc. ...with you Boulder, Colorado, USA 303.581.0800 http://www.wwsi.com