Shoot Up Your System Speed!

Have you ever wondered why your system goes slow all of a sudden when you are working on some application with few other applications open simultaneously. Lets see an example. Here we open an Excel file. Now just to check the status, how much space this process is using and whats our CPU usage, we go to Windows Task Manager (by clicking CTRL+SHIFT+DEL on your keyboard simultaneously) and click Processes tab and sort the list in descending order on Memory Usage. As we can observe here in the figure below, we notice that Excel.exe (2nd process from top) is using memory 13,604K and CPU usage is 55%.

Now go to Excel and minimise it. Recheck your windows task manager and check the amount of RAM being used by Excel.exe. Shocked? Its three times less and so is the CPU Usage. Readings for Memory usage going down to 4.424K and CPU usage falling down to 16%. Check the figure below which shows the same.

Just proves that if we minimise the applications that are not being used at that time, by clicking the (-) minimise button on top right of the application, we can increase the amount of available RAM by a huge margin. Infact depending on the applications open, the difference can be as much as 30-60% percent of extra RAM. When we minimise an application it indicates that it won't be utilized by the user right now. Therefore, the OS automatically makes the application use virtual memory & keeps minimum amount of the code in physical RAM.