RAM usage and swapfile (XP Home)

P4 1,8 GHz
256 MB ram
40 GB HD


My computer just uses a lot of RAM, and I was just wondering why. On the attachment I've added a picture of my systray, it's in dutch however but it shouldn't be too hard to understand

I asked a friend how much ram his computer uses, and he said 170 MB. So I was a bit stumped as how this can happen.
The computer can handle it BTW, but it's very annoying since everything on the computer just goes a lot slower.


On the picture you'll see that JBuilder and messenger and Opera is also running, I did that on purpose. When I close JBuilder the computer still uses about 233 MB, which is still too much I think...



I hope someone can help me, and If you've got questions or remarks just reply.....but you got that part already probably

Welcome to TechSpot forums

First you can shut down any services that XP is running and you don't need

Techspot XP Services tweak guide

Also check out the memory tweak guide:
Techspot XP memory tweak guide

That should give you somewhere to start

Also, if you have disabled the Pagefile, or if you are using the tweak that loads kernel to RAM instead of paging, then it would explain the heavy memory usage. Those two tweaks shouldn't be used unless you have more than 512MB RAM.