RAM / SWAP

The RAM / SWAP Monitor application was designed to display: - pie charts and numerical values for the Physical RAM and SWAPfile (Page file) usage in your PC, - the free space and total capacity of any single drive selected by the user. - the CPU usage on Windows 95 / 98 PCs. - The number of left / right mouse botton clicks and / or the distance the mouse pointer has travelled in Km or Miles.

If your PC has multiple CPUs, then the CPU Usage reported by RAM / Swap Monitor is the average across all CPUs. RAM / SWAP Monitor also contains functionality to make the PC's Speaker Beep or make some sound whenever the CPU usage drops below a user specified level for a user specified number of seconds.   This could come in handy for telling you when a big job has ended, such as a Virus Scan, Disk Scan, Disk Defragment, CD Burning, etc. This functionality is available under the "CPU Usage Drop Alarm" menu option, under the "File" menu.

To use this program, simply run it and observe the RAM usage and SWAP file usage details change as you run it. If you do not want to see the textual Free KB / Total KB details for RAM and SWAP, then simply re-size the window to hide these details.

The Spinning Line (between the RAM and Swap labels) spins everytime the RAM / Swapfile usage details are updated. i.e. it confirms that the program is still operating -even when the graphs are stable.

When RAM utilisation is high, then non-essential chunks of code and data are automatically written (by Windows) to a special file known as a Swapfile or Page file, where they can be loaded again (if and when needed) much faster than if the individual chunks of code and data were searched for and loaded again from their respective source files.

When RAM and/or Swap file utilisation is high, system performance can suffer dramatically. When this happens, it is be best to buy more RAM and/or allocate more swap file space.

Also, if you find your temporary swap file is always dramatically changing in size / usage, then it may be best to allocate a permanent large swap file. (This avoids lots of disk usage / disk thrashing caused when the temporary swapfile is resized).

If your permanent Swapfile is too small for your needs, then non-essential chunks of code / data are thrown away completely instead of written to the swapfile, and will mean that they will have to be searched for and loaded again from their respective source files. This is much slower than re-loading them from the Swapfile.

If your permenent Swapfile is far larger than you need, then you can shrink it down and recover the disk space for other needs.

RAM / SWAP Monitor can help you monitor your PC's RAM / Swapfile usage, so that upgrade / system tuning decisions can then be made. Basically, all this means that you will be better able to monitor what is happening in your PC and tune it accordingly. You may be surprised to see just how much RAM / Swap Windows 95 / 98 / NT uses up just in loading itself.