Memory

Commit-Charge: (total) total of physical and virtual memory in use

(limit) total the OS makes available to applications

Physical Memory (total) amount of RAM installed

(available) total RAM windows makes available to apps before swapping

(system cache) total amount of RAM used to cache recently accessed data and programs

Kernel Memory (total) amount of RAM used by kernel

(paged) amount of kernel mapped to pages

(non-paged) amount of kernel that must remain in RAM

If (Total Commit Charge) > (Total Physical Memory) Then (Paging Occurs)

If (Peak Commit Charge) > (Total Physical Memory) then (Paging Will Have Been Occurring)

If you have excessive amounts of physical memory, windows caches recently accessed data for faster performance

Task Manager

End task on the Programs Tab, is the same as close a program via its menus: End Task on the Process Tab will immeadiately try to zap the program.

Monitoring IO Read/Writes can tell you which programs are causing disk thrashing