Always 50%+ RAM usage - Is this excessive?

[Stuart*]

I'm hoping someone will be able to answer whether it's excessive for my PC to always be using more than 50% of the RAM even when I have nothing but the operating system running.

I have a 1 year old Intel Dual Core (2.20GHz each) running on 32-bit Vista Home Premium, with 1Gb of RAM.

I've checked the 'start up' programs in the config file, and this is all that's running:

which doesn't explain the usage. I'm not sure why the OS shows up three times.

I'm fairly sure it didn't run this slow when I first got it, and I'm quite good about removing junk temp files.

Can anyone suggest the reason for this high RAM usage, or should I just buy some more?

[Dr Lobster*]

the reason for the high ram usage is... vista.

you can reduce usage by taking some of those things out of your start up for instance (ie, the java update checker and those nvidia things, the driver and display properties function normally without them)

there are numerous sites on the web with lists of common services you can disable in windows if you're just using it in a home environment.

for instance, if you don't have a printer, why keep the spooler service running?

just out of interest, what does your tasklist look like?

[lukey]

The reason is Vista, but it's not all bad.

Vista takes the belief that having RAM doing nothing is a bit pointless. Which is true. So it caches programs and data from your disk (and does some psuedo-clever guessing about when to cache what based on your usage habits) to fill up the majority of your RAM - which can often be a bit misleading if your pooter is otherwise idle. There's the slight cost that it obviously has to dump all this if you very suddenly want to open up Photoshop and edit some gigapixel images but generally this is better than having it sit there unused.

I think you could disable this behaviour if you really wanted (look in to SuperFetch), but unless you're having tangible performance problems, there's not much reason to.

[Stuart*]

Thank you DrLobster* and lukey for your replies. The consensus seems to be that Vista is just RAM heavy even if the system is 'idle'. This is only normally a problem when I'm starting 'Pinnacle Studio 11' for some video capture/edit and running it at the same time as 'PhotoDraw'.

I'll get rid of the Nvidia and Java files from the start-up. The tasklist (Services running tab) is normally full of MS programs - many I don't recognise, but there doesn't seem to be a way of preventing these at start-up, even though they are subsequently shown as 'stopped')....other than that there are normally only two:



Many thanks for your advice!

[Chie]

Ctrl+alt+del

Start Task Manager

Processes

That will show you how much CPU and RAM each application and service is using.

[Alexia]

there doesn't seem to be a way of preventing these at start-up

Try using CCleaner.