Assignment Requirements
1. Write down the steps to find out how much RAM is installed in a windows XP machine
2. Write down the steps to find out how much RAM is installed in a windows 7 machine
3. Write a small paragraph explaining how to find out if more RAM is needed in a machine.

1. WINDOWS XP
A. Click on the Start button (lower left corner of the Taskbar)
B. In the menu that opens, right click on My Computer
D. In the subsequent short-cut menu, click on Properties
E. Under the General tab, you will find how much RAM the computer has and information on the processor and version of Windows used
2. On a computer that is running Windows 7, the usable memory (RAM) may be less than the installed memory. For example, a 32-bit version of Windows 7 may report that there is only 3.5 GB of usable system memory on a computer that has 4 GB of memory installed.
3.
First, use your computer! Fire it up and launch all of the apps that you generally have going. Open a few browser tabs, get your email going, etc. Try to do an average session - don't open every app on your machine. In the example below, this is my laptop that's running Outlook, IE with several tabs, Chrome with several tabs, Notepad, Windows Explorer, a couple of chat apps, Dropbox and Snag-It.

Launch Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del & then 'start task manager'; OR right click task bar at the bottom of your screen and 'start task manager') Switch to the 'Performance' tabClick the 'Resource Monitor...' button at the bottom of the window, and it will pop up a window that looks like this. There are 5 different sections of memory usage on the bar graph, but only 3 of them are really important to you. First one (in grey) is hardware reserved - this is RAM that hardware uses & there's nothing you can do about this, so not important. This amount will generally be pretty low. Third one (in orange)