So.... seandogue uses a circa 1995 2005 (doh!) computer as his main desktop workstation (he also has a nearly brand spankin new superduperree laptop, but it's just not gertrude, if you know what i mean...) Anyway... My computer is old, yes, but relatively solid. A bit sketchy since it's XP but whatever. The issue is memory and memory usage. I just added a pair of 2G modules to boost it's effective memory from 2 to 3 G. )XP old and only acknowledge s the first 3 even though my machine can accept up to 8G Prior to the upgrade, my initial memory usage upon completion of windows load (desk is up and no more hourglass backgroundy stuff) usage was about 800M, prior to loading any "actionable" software (Ie, ignoring the sundry processes and applications that run automatically after on at boot...I mean programming IDEs, notepads, calculators, email, browsers, photoshop, cad progs, winamp, labview, music comp, etc.) And now? darn if my baseline memory load hasn't dropped over 60%, down to ~490M So. what gives, ibles-sages? Me, I'm stumped (seriously) .At first, I thought to myself, 'hrrrrm... maybe it has something to do with swapping...', but then almost immediately I discounted that, since I hadn't reached threshold for swap to engage. Then I thought, "Is it possible there was damage on the 1G chips that would go unrecognized but would cause memory load to be higher than it should have been? Are newer modules more efficient or something?" To add to the confusion, it *seems (I haven't done any serious forensics and really don't want to have to) . applications of various sorts seem to take less memory as well. Then I came here. kinda tired of hashing out every single solution all by my lonesome and I'm hoping someone will be able to clear that confusion up with an authoritative response. Just doesn't make sense to me why my load would drop by such a significant amount, and I'm really and truly tired as hell of speculating and of speculation.. Speculation eats time like dime store candy surrounded by a hundred hungry children. and it more often than not produces erroneous output.. (no, not looking to debate the efficacy of speculation either, My best feature is the ability to speculate, and it pays to know how, but even I get tired of living in a nebula of "there is no like right like answer" 100% of the time.) So heps a mind-worn joe, aye? Someone please tells me in no uncertain terms why this is? >>>> More memory added, less memory used? I really don't want to launch another google search that may or may not yield the answer after reading a few hundred erroneous or misleading posts. To be very clear, the system is behaving BETTER, not WORSE, with the new modules, even when operating at quiescence, where max memory overruns (and the subsequent swapping that such overruns spur) aren't an issue. thanks gracias danka...