Vista is using 568mb of RAM?!?

T

tnu5

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 17, 2007
Messages
126
This is after I got rid of a few services. Fresh install, bit defender installed.

That's insane.

XP took 120mb w/ bit defender installed.

I think I'm going to re-install xp for a dual boot.
 
It's not really using much extra at all. You're seeing a difference in the way memory is handled. Much of what you're seeing as 'in use' is simply RAM that's been allocated for use. It ain't locked up and forever again unavailable.

There are topics about it on this forum somewheres or other.
 
This has been discussed in great detail over and over. Vista doesn't use much more memory than XP it's just it's aggressive caching mechanism. Superfetch is one of them. It also keeps more in memory at a time than XP. All this is volatile memory allocation and in no way affects the available memory to application.

Use Process Explorer to verify this: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx

BTW, Linux has virtually the same concept. If you try to copy a 1.5GB file and you have lets say 2GB free memory. It's will cache the whole 1.5GB so if you access it or copy it again it doesn't have to read it from the physical disk.
 
Why would you complain about a Vista using the hardware you paid for? I paid $200 for my 2 GB of Crucial Ballistix, and I certainly want to make sure that investment is used. The fact that an OS is using your hardware, such as Aero using your GPU instead of your CPU is a good thing.
 
Superfetch is doing it's job. It's caching un-used RAM to make your PC "snappier". If you have a program (such as a game) that needs that RAM, it unloads the cache and loads your game. After you close the game, and it un-allocates that memory, you should see a lot of free RAM, but it will slowly go down as the Superfetch cache is repopulating.

It's a good thing that you don't see a lot of "available" RAM. It's there for the taking, but it's being used for a good purpose instead of sitting there worthless.
 
tnu5 said:
This is after I got rid of a few services. Fresh install, bit defender installed.

That's insane.

XP took 120mb w/ bit defender installed.

I think I'm going to re-install xp for a dual boot.
Click to expand...

Aw man vista is going easy on you. It's using 1.04GB of ram with just media player and internet explorer on my rig, but I also have like 3GB of ram though.
 
marcusj3000 said:
Aw man vista is going easy on you. It's using 1.04GB of ram with just media player and internet explorer on my rig, but I also have like 3GB of ram though.
Click to expand...

I'm sitting at 1700MB/3069MB used!

But I regularly load VS2005, Photoshop CS2 (and 3), Office apps, VPN client, Firefox & IE.

So all those apps are preloaded into memory which allows them to startup nearly instantly!

When I go play a game, the Vista memory manager quickly releases memory as needed so that's not a problem.
 
this isnt like back in the day where if you have your os running on 50 megs it meant your computer was tuned and ready.
 
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