I enountered this problem in the morning and I thought that it would go away within a few minutes. I'm sure that my 512 MBs worth of memory was fine before.
I reinstalled Windows XP SP2 on my secondary hard drive that has about 4.5 GBs and I wanted use my other 160 GB hard drive primarily for downloaded files. Windows XP SP2 was on the 160 GB HDD in the very beginning, not on the spare 4.5 GB one.

I never had memory problems this bad before. The only thing eating up my memory is Firefox with a 50,176K usage. Usually when it's at 100,000K to 125,000K it would definitely make the memory status red and off the charts, but I'm seeing red and orange constantly. Explorer.exe is behind Firefox with 15,052K and these are only paging file statistics.

http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d22/dspRcs/memoryproblem.jpg

I assume that it may be something with the 4.5 GB hard drive that may be causing these weird memory issues. My paging memory seems AOK, but I don't know what exactly is going on.

Should I reinstall Windows XP Pro with SP2 on the 160 GB hard drive again? I don't know much about hard drives, so please help me out on this one.

Or know any other solution? I already did the CCleaner, TuneUp 2006, Ad-aware check. This is close to a fresh installation too.


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This is without Firefox 2.0.0.1 running.
With process memory consumption like this, how could I reach up to 70-80% memory usage?

http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d22/dspRcs/memoryproblem-1.jpg

I'm sorry but from what you have posted I don't see any issue.
With a dual core CPU and XP SP2 your maxmem apps could be giving you miss leading information.

Are you experiencing any performance issues ?

My current CPU is only 2.8 GHz by Intel. I am experiencing some performance issues with some programs.

I tried installing a program earlier and it crashed my computer. I used the TuneUp Utilities RAM optimizer to read my RAM consumption instead of the MaxMem reader and it said that only 5MB or less was left remaining while the installer was running.

The Windows Task Manager showed nothing blatantly off the charts.

But I guess it may be a problem on my side. I didn't do any tweaks to the system and how to make it run faster.. but I do have one question. Is it okay to install and boot XP from my I: hard drive (3.5 GBs)?