4. Keep An Eye On Memory Usage

While your notebook is running, you tend to open more and more applications. Each of these, of course, requires its own memory. Windows computers aren't limited to random access memory (RAM). They also can use hard disk space for what is called "virtual memory" or the "paging file". Disk memory is slower than RAM memory in almost all cases. When everything fits in RAM your computer generally runs faster than if all or parts of applications must be swapped out to virtual memory to make room for other applications that need immediate access to RAM in order to continue running.

Windows Task Manager lets you see how your computer is using resources. To open it right click on the Taskbar and select Task Manager. Click the Performance tab. In the Task Manager screen capture below you can see that page file usage is low and flat. PF Usage at the moment of capture is 979 MB. Looking at Kernel Memory on the lower right side of the Task Manager window you can see that 94,732 kB or about 92.5 MB of the Windows operating system is currently in virtual memory. This computer has 3 GB of RAM (see Physical Memory on Task Bar Performance page) and 4 GB of virtual memory (Commit Charge: Limit minus RAM again on Task Bar Performance page). At this point there is plenty of both RAM and paging memory available; over 2 GB of RAM and about 3 GB of paging memory. Performance should not be impacted by memory issues, though even in this situation too many apps running can cause performance problems, especially with slower CPUs, RAM and disk.

If paging space is low, go to Settings > Control Panel > System, click the Advanced tab and click the Settings button for Performance. On the Performance Options dialog box go to "Virtual memory" and click the Change button. In the Virtual Memory dialog box be sure the "Custom size" radio button is selected and set "Paging file size" to double the amount of RAM in your notebook. Also, consider installing a disk drive that runs faster (more revolutions per minute or RPMs) and has a larger cache size (usually stated in MB), which will make for faster paging.

Now take a look at how applications are using RAM. Click on the Processes tab of the Task Manager window and order the results by Mem Usage (click the Mem Usage column label until the list is sort by highest to lowest memory usage). You can stop processes with Task Manager, for example processes that are eating up a lot of memory, but be careful. Unless you know what you're stopping you could crash your notebook. You could gain back over 122 MB by stopping svchost.exe, but you'd be stopping a number of services that run under this service.

However, take a look at the Task Manager dialog box below. You could save 25 MB of memory by stopping Skype or Word; 50 MB by stopping both. But, can you afford to stop these two applications? For many the answer will be no. The VoIP application Skype works best if it's always running and Word is often used by a number of applications other than the word processor itself. For example if you run Microsoft Outlook and use Word for your message editor, stopping Word will force you to edit messages using Outlook's much less user friendly text editor.

NOTE: You've been looking at RAM memory use by the processes running on your notebook. If you also want to see virtual memory use by process, open Task Manager's View menu and pick Select Columns. On the Select Columns dialog box, check the box for Virtual Memory Size.

Even if you can't or don't want to stop an application, you can close instances of it. For example, if you have multiple copies of Word running, close those you're done with. If you don't want to close instances of an application, you can save some RAM just by minimizing Windows that have the application running in them. Depending on what has been entered into an application, minimizing it can save a little to a lot of RAM and even some virtual memory. You can see how much you save by watching memory usage in Task Manager as you minimize and restore a Window.