Question on resources issue

[BuddyB]

I'm pretty familiar with cleaning the system and related stuff like that. I bought my wife a Toshiba laptop about 2 1/2 years ago, and it has been a splendid machine with very few issues. She started with 2 gigs of RAM, and she seemed to eat up the resources pretty quickly with stuttering audio and streaming video. I replaced that with 4 gigs. She is still experiencing the same issue. When I check resources out of 4 she has 2.8 available for use. That strikes me as a bit much. She has Norton on her machine, and I've considered replacing it with AVG to see if that would render more resources. I don't believe the overhead on Win7/32 would take up that much of the RAM. And of course there may be other reasons why the issue. 3 gigs I would think will provide enough for most video/audio needs. On my machine I did have Norton, no issues, but most of my piers feel it is klunky and a resource hog, so I switched. So far it is serving me well, no complaints. I believe my wife's processor is a 1.7. Any thoughts appreciated.

[Chris B]

Free RAM is not a good indication of system performance. Windows considers free RAM as wasted RAM and will fill it with "stuff". If you give us the actual system specs we might be able to look - also exactly what you are doing. Lets start with the video. You say "Streaming video". First questions
1) What video (source, bitrate, size, codec)
2) From where (hard drive, network - wired or wireless)
3) Using what player?

If you could share all your windows experience scores (Start > type "experience" and select "check windows experience scores") it might indicate the relative performance of the machine.

[Bob]

...When I check resources out of 4 she has 2.8 available for use. That strikes me as a bit much.

That "stuff" Chris mentioned is called the System Cache and it's necessary for performance. If you reduce the amount of available memory, you reduce the amount of system cache and your performance will drop. If you reduce the available RAM to zero, there will be no System Cache and all program segments and data segments that need to be retrieved will have to be read from disk which is considerably slower -- especially on a laptop where slower hard drives are used to conserve battery power. It can significantly slow down your computer.

Stuttering audio and streaming video are not typically caused by a shortage of RAM. If these are being streamed over the Internet, the most likely cause is a slow or congested Internet connection. It could also be a busy server at the source location. Stuttering can also occur from activity on the laptop. If something else is running at the same time, it could be using a lot of CPU power or doing a lot of reading or writing to the hard drive -- both of which could cause stuttering. Sometimes, stuttering can be a sign of a virus infection. Other things can cause this too.

[BuddyB]

I will be working on Bonnie's computer this weekend, which is Tues and Wed fo' me. I will see what I can determine and cure. Thanks for the input guys.