Memory Usage Test

On the Lockdown2000 website, specifically at http://www.lockdown2000.com/Lockdown2000.html as well as on other pages on Harbor Telco's sites and on those of their resellers; the promotion states that Lockdown:

"Works as an idle program in the system tray and uses almost none of your computer's memory." (The emphasis is theirs, not mine.)

I tested the memory usage of Lockdown2000 as follows:

Lockdown2000 v2.5.4 was installed on a Pentium 166 with 32 MBytes of RAM and running Windows 95.

Wintop and System Monitor were set up to run immediately upon startup. System Monitor was set to display allocated memory, available memory, and disk cache size.

Lockdown was set not to run on startup so initial conditions without Lockdown could be measured.

The system was rebooted.

At startup (click for full-scale image):

The system was allowed to run for about two minutes to stabilize. System Monitor showed 21.6 MBytes allocated memory, 26.5 MBytes available memory, and a 9.0 MByte disk cache.

Wintop showed only the following running processes:

• KERNEL32.DLL (The Windows system kernel)
• MSGSRV32.EXE (Windows message server)
• MPREXE.EXE (Multiple Provider Router, a basic networking process.)
• WINTOP.EXE (Windows process monitor)
• MMTASK.TSK (Background multimedia task manager)
• EXPLORER.EXE (The Windows user interface)
• SYSTRAY.EXE (System Tray application)
• SYSMON.EXE (Windows System Monitor)

Lockdown was started using a desktop icon (click for full-scale image):

Lockdown2000 appeared in Wintop's process list. It announced its trojan scan, and its icon appeared in the system tray. I let it run for 2 minutes.

System Monitor showed 28.6 MBytes allocated memory, 21.1 MBytes available memory, and a 12.2 MByte disk cache.

This shows that Lockdown caused:

• an increase in allocated memory of 7 megabytes;
• a drop in available memory of 5.4 megabytes;
• and an increase in disk cache size of 3.2 megabytes.

In sum, The Windows System Monitor reported that Lockdown consumed a minimum of 5.4 megabytes of memory resources.