 Number 206 - July 2000 |
| Hang Onto Those Resources | ||
| by Jean Wilcox, Dec 1999 Suncoast Beeper, St Petersburg, FL | ||
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Everybody who remembers
the problems we had with depleted Windows system resources under
[Windows] version 3.1, please raise your hand. Yes, I thought so. It was
an ongoing nuisance that could crash the computer with little or no
warning. System resources are little chunks of memory set aside by the
operating system to handle the needs of the system, the user, and the
GDI, or Graphic Device Interface. These are things like your
personalized settings, all menu items, and everything that that is
displayed on screen, thus "graphic device interface". If you can see it,
it definitely eats the resources. This has absolutely nothing to do
with your RAM. You can have 256 KB of it and still crash. Also, the more
things you load at start up, the fewer free resources you'll have to
begin with.
Win95 and 98 handle this situation better, (MUCH better), but it's still entirely possible to run out of them if you don't take some precautions. Even if you don't run totally out and freeze up, they can be low enough that your whole computer runs so slowly that you think it's 1993 again. To forestall this unhappy situation, it's a good idea to take matters into your own hands. The first thing you need is a method to keep an eye on things. This can be easily handled by a little applet contained within Windows itself called the Resource Meter. You'll find it listed under your Program, Accessories, System Tools if it's been installed. It is not installed by default, so if you don't see it there you'll have to pullout the CD and put it in yourself. Go to Add/Remove programs and in the Properties dialog box choose Windows Setup tab. Select System Tools in the Components list box:, click Details. When the System Tools dialog box shows up, scroll through the Components box until you find System Resource Meter, which you then check. Follow the rest of the procedure as you normally would. Once it's installed and on your menu, it would be a good idea to have it load on bootup by making a shortcut to it in the Programs, Start Up folder. If you don't want to fool with that, then just run it manually every time you start the computer. 
Once it's running, you'll see a little icon with
three horizontal green bars in your Task Bar menu area at the bottom
right of your screen. Hover the mouse over it and you'll be presented
with a bubble box that tells you the percentage of free resources, or
clicking the icon will obtain a graphic view of the same information. As
the
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programs you're running consume the
resources, you can see the three green bars change to two, or even one.
And if that last one turns yellow or red, then you are definitely in
trouble, computer-wise. A major crash is imminent.
Every program, even the elements of Windows itself, uses up these resources when they're running. Most of them will return the resources when the program closes, but not necessarily ALL the resources. The worst offenders are Internet browsers, no matter which brand you use. They are resource pigs, on steroids. The longer you surf, the more the gauge drops. Next worse, I think, are graphics programs, any graphics programs. The more pictures you use, the fewer resources you have left. (If you'd like to see the resources disappear like magic, download graphics from the Internet while you have a Paint-type or page layout program open to receive them!) MS Word also is bad; why, I don't know, but it is. And every document you open within Word will chew up some more. Generally when you see your resources getting low, you can remedy the situation by closing up the apps that are not absolutely necessary at the moment and hope they release all the resources they had claimed. Sometimes, you can't. It is a really good idea to shut everything down and reboot when you have for some time been heavily into programs that are resource hogs. The few minutes you spend shutting down and rebooting will be made up in no time flat when you find your newly rebooted computer flying along again at top speed. I believe if you experiment with this idea a little, you'll soon find which of your programs are most likely to give you problems and you'll find a system to handle things that works best for you. Open and shut your apps as you watch the meter's readings. Make a point of paying particular attention for a few days and more than likely you'll have fewer unexplained lock-ups. I know I did. I can identify very precisely which of my programs eat resources like kids eat candy and I can stop most problems before they stop me.
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Number 206 - July 2000
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