Holy gasping for memory Batman!  Those are the lowest numbers I've ever seen!  Most well configured XP machines show 1200 to 1600 MB (1.2 to 1.6 GB) for the start and now numbers.  The lowest "now" number I've seen is about 450MB on really old machines running low memory.  What this means is that Windows only has 145 MB available for Qimage  Ultimate to work with.  Do you have oodles of other big programs running or is there anything you can think of that would be eating memory?  Obviously Qimage Ultimate isn't using 671MB of RAM when it starts either so it sounds like the machine is starting other processes or loading other things in the background when you start a program.  I'd start by looking at the config of that machine to get the initial 816MB number up and that may also take care of the "missing" 671MB between "start" and "now" as well.  If you have 4 GB of RAM on that machine and only 816MB are available to any given program (before you even start QU), that's where the problem lies.

Mike

somehow my post was duplicated - it wasn't that great  

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg487503.aspx  refers to XP and other os ram limits.
Below is my boot.ini file

boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /3GB /fastdetect /noguiboot

Afaik, they dropped the PAE after sp2 (or maybe it was sp1 - I'm on sp3). noexecute implies it any way.

Other things, set the swap/page file to a disk other than the the OS, if possible. You can get there by: - my computer, system properties, advanced, performance settings, advanced, virtual memory, change . I've actually allocated an 8GB partition to the paging file, with an initial size of 4000MB as a custom size. Others may argue about letting the system manage the size - I'm just saying what works for me. Also set the memory usage and processor scheduling to 'programs' (on the last 'advanced' window).

You may also need to change your bios settings. If you still have less memory than you think you should have available, then I would suggest you do the three fingered salute, and check what processes you have running. Some software does not close properly, and still leaves memory allocated. Some devices may also use shared memory, but hopefully not many these days.

hth.

Best wishes,

Ray

Actually, those numbers are much better than Carlos' numbers because he only had 145MB available to QU and you had 482.  I've seen values in the mid to high 400's before so while that was (I see you improved it) pretty bad, it's not horrible.  Notice though that you had 448 additional.  That means that you've got decent memory: it was just fragmented.  The three numbers in the report show the largest contiguous chunk of memory available.  That's because Windows will refuse to allocate memory unless it's in one contiguous chunk so if you try to allocate memory for a 500MB image, Windows will simply return an error if the largest contiguous chunk is only 482MB.  I know... not very nice of Mr. Gates but that's what we have to work with. 

So your report above indicated that the largest contiguous chunk of memory was 482MB but that the next largest (after that) was 448MB.  Fortunately the 64 bit operating systems like Vista x64 and Win7 x64 are much better about this.  If you have more than about 3 GB of RAM installed on those x64 OS's and you do this check in QU, you get 2000MB for the start/now every time.  That's because 2GB is the largest chunk of memory that is "allocatable" to a 32 bit process and those OS's are smarter and will allow the max every time due to better memory management.

Mike

Mike,

Turns out this machine only had 2GB of RAM 

Just installed 4GB RAM and now my numbers are:

Start: 816MB
Addl: 328MB
Now: 816MB