Total physical vs available memory ???

Is it normal to have a difference between total physical memory & available physical memory.

I have a laptop with severe slowness problems (suspecting spyware - working on it) but I checked the memory status in system resources and have the following difference:

Total physical memory 256.00MB
Avalable physical memory 134.38MB

Is it normal to have such a difference, or could I have a blown memory module that is creating a need for constant virtual paging.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

Total Physical Memory is the total size of the RAM you have installed and the OS sees....depending on your OS the usage of physical memory would vary.
OS using more of the Virtual memory would not cause the system to use more of the actual memory (RAM), actually quite the opposite. Also depending on the processes/applications/services running in the background the physical memory usage would change. Viruses/Trojans/other malwares would definitely cause more RAM usage. Application that has memory leaks would do the same....
Can't comment on your system having some sort of a malware infection. If you suspect that there might be one, then have your system scanned and/or go thru the stickies in the 'Spyware Specific' section.
Again depending on your OS and the other factors I mentioned above, the current 52% physical memory usage may be normal too.

 

The short answer to your question is a definite "maybe".

The "Available physical memory" is physical memory that's not currently allocated, and is available to the operating system and any applications. That figure changes on a second-by-second basis, and depends on what demands are currently being made by the system and its software.

Right now, I have about 40MB of available physical memory, and that's with 5 applications showing in my taskbar and another 10 in my system tray. I have a total of 256MB of installed physical memory.

If your system is ignoring large amounts of available memory in favour of virtual memory, that will impact negatively on performance -- as you have pointed out. I've no idea what would cause something like that.

IMHO, a blown memory module would not be visible to the BIOS or Windows (if it let your machine start at all). It would not be included in the "total physical memory" count. Check the reported figure against what's actually installed in the machine. They should agree.

You might want to run a tool like the Windows 98 System Monitor for a while, and keep an eye on virtual and physical memory usage before you leap to any conclusions about the "available physical memory" figure you have reported.