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Is there any way to tell my computer that when a certain application (such as a game) is playing, that it must reserve ###MB of ram exclusively for use in that program? Also, is there a batch file or something I can use to shut down certain applications when I run another, and then restart the programs when the other is terminated?

The reason I ask this is that my memory optimization is low, and despite the fact that I now have 1GB of RAM, The Sims 2 still runs really slow and I don't want to have to manually shut down AVG, ZoneAlarm, Spybot, Ad-Aware, WindowBlinds, and some of my other memory hogs (I'm not even sure that WindowBlinds is capable of temporary shutdown without just exiting its processes) while running it. Perhaps TS2 is running slow because about 1GB of my Paging File in my Virtual HDD Memory is constantly in use. I already have my Sims 2 Shortcut redirected at a batch file used to start up TS2 on "High" priority, but I want to add lines to it to shut down those processes until the process TS2EP4.EXE is terminated, then have them restart. I also want to reserve about 512MB of RAM exclusively for The Sims.

Is there an application that will allow you to allocate a specific amount of memory to a specific program/game/app? No, I don't think so. How many processes do you have running on average at any one time?

Some programs like firefox have tweaking abilities so you can limit memory but not many.

46 processes are running on my computer when my games and all my security stuff is turned off. This number does not include Task Manager or Firefox.

most of those processes are driver related...and most of them don't need to be there

When I was running XP, i had my processes at 23 loading while i had Firefox and Trillian and Thunderbird open

In Vista i'm currently running with 39 with 2 instances of IE7, outlook 2007, trillian, and a whole bunch of other stuff that i haven't bothered tweaking yet...

I use Trillian too.

Which of these should I disable on startup?

Edit: P.S. I want to keep Animal_Clock.exe, and disregard mspaint.exe because that's what I used to get that process list.

Ooh theres quite a few there. What i suggest is you google each one and then decide whether you need them or not although some of them are important windows processes - dont get rid of them

Chris