I've got a Windows 2000 Pro machine with 96MB of RAM. It is a little slow to boot, but once in Windows it's performance is terrible.

If you look at the performance in Task Manager straight after a boot then the Commit Charge Total reads 140MB (or there abouts). This figure never falls, only increasing with each application that's run. (The Commit Charge Limit is 198MB) The CPU usage is 2% whilst this is going on, and there's only a few things in the system tray.

Should the Commit Charge be this high? What is wrong with this machine? Is this a sign of a memory leak?

Thank you in advance.

My commit charge is 497M at the moment, running Opera, Norton and a few other background applications. It does fall with every application I close though.
Try and get a free memoery tester and diagnostic tool, which will probably be able to tell you if you've got a problem with your memory.

It will fall as usual and generally..

Commit Charge is basically the power that is used by your processor.. And page file is a virtual RAM on your harddisk, which everyone will have, to run applications faster and acts as a dual RAM on top of your physical RAM.

I see that you got 96MB RAM, that far too little for a computer running Windows 2000. I've got computer with 128MB RAM running Windows XP. Though it works fine but its really very slow. Basically when your physical RAM is near to using everything up, your computer will stress the RAM to your page file, which is stored on your harddisk.. During this process, your processor is generating, creating, modifying and processing data into this virtual RAM file. Therefore it increases your commit charge, because now your processor is involved.

Basically for a computer with 96MB RAM, you will hardly, or never, see your computer's commit charge fall.. It's basically working all the while from the time you boot the system up to the time you shut it down..
What's worst, you can get your harddisk damaged, because it's been writing and writing non stop, as well as overheating and consumes alot of power..

So solve this problem, upgrade your physical RAM to at least 256MB.. But I would recommend 512MB because for Windows XP, Windows 2000 or and later OS versions, it will take quite a certain amount of memory, yet you still have some left for your own applications..
You wouldn't want a computer just to run Windows OS without any applications right?

That\\
Commit Charge High And Remains There

Commit charge has NOTHING to do with the CPU. It is the amount of real and virtual memory available, minus the non pageable memory.

-Lanshark