Wasted System Resources

[Indybird]

Just today I took a look at my RAM usage without any applications open (Windows Vista). My RAM usage was a whopping 50%! There were no backround applications such as virus scans or bad programming taking it up. I actually added up all the RAM usage under the "processes" tab in the task manager. That all came to 10%, so where the hell is the other 40% going to!? I have 2GB of DDR2 RAM which means unless Im gaming it should never get to 50%.

Please help, this could mean a big performance boost for me if I can fix this!

Thanks,
Indybird

[Mitternacht]

I'm getting a serious deja vu from this.

Maybe Vista was using the RAM and wasn't showing exactly why it was using it.

[AJ@PR]

Just out of curiosity, what program/application 'reported' the RAM usage?

Was is Vista's Task Manager...
Can you try a 3rd party application for such?

[Indybird]

I had been using Windows Task Manager. I actually just tried the G15 Task Manager (for the Logitech G15 Keyboard LCD). It reports there to be 50+ programs running, many taking up 20,000K+. Windows Task manager only reports about 30 with like two taking up 10,000K. The problem is that explorer.exe is taking up 120,000K! I know for a fact that it never took up this much before...

Do you think it could have anything to do with the cache? If so, how can I set it to keep the cache to a minimum?

Thanks,
Indybird

[AJ@PR]

Do you think it could have anything to do with the cache? If so, how can I set it to keep the cache to a minimum?
Damn friend... got me there. No idea.

Hmm... gonna think about it. :?

[.Maleficus.]

http://www.nerdmax.com/2007/03/08/lower-vistas-memory-usage-in-5-minutes/

It's a start.

[Indybird]

I Suppose, but I actually love and use Windows Search. I already turned off Readyboost and I think I'll turn off pre-fetch. I think theres another problem though...

-Indybird

[Greco101]

definitely... You shouldn't have to turn off anything in the 1st place... thats a **** load of resources! Gotta be something wrong there, especially if it was all of the sudden.

[Mysteriphys]

Explorer.exe is known to harbor resources for virus' if you get one, and will load up your memory, did you try a virus/spyware/rootkit scan?

[Redundant]

Explorer.exe is known to harbor resources for virus' if you get one, and will load up your memory, did you try a virus/spyware/rootkit scan?
I'm 99.99% sure it's not a virus.

Vista makes, how should I say this, "empty boxes" in the ram. That makes it appear to be used even if the "boxes" are empty. Not sure why, but they must have wrote it to do that for some reason.

[alexanderH]

I think vista is still relatively new to most of us, however as I recall I had the same problem on a fresh install on a brand new hard drive. As that is all on the computer that I am in the process of fabricating, it could be a while before I can verify. However also as I recall if there was nothing running, I could load up several applications and the ram usage would not go up. So maybe Microsoft is terrible at addition?

My favorite ability of vista though is that you can plug in high-speed memory and use it as plug and play ram! You can turn an empty camera memory card into temporary ram and boost system capacity to say 8gb! How awesome is that?

[Eclecticos]

More than likely you have waaayyy to many programs running at startup.
You could download Spybot (http://www.spybot.com/en/download/index.html), and check it all out in: Tools -=> System Startup

I check that and the Prefetch folder once a week. You can download (http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=f5b13626-b266-4334-b2e5-157bd66ca5af) a meter for you sidebar so it easier to see if what you've removed from the list has made any difference.

[D1337]

msconfig

[ownaginatious]

I heard Vista caches a lot more than previous windows systems to go faster. I have 3 GB of ram, and mine is at about 30% when I only have a few explorer windows and a search browser open. All those clever visual effects like to eat RAM, and so do all those other usually unecessary services (e.g. ReadyBoost). You can save around 150MB of ram by disabling a lot of that stuff :p

[yazeed1906]

on the one windoze box i have left this (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx) is what I use...

[agnat]

There is an unofficial patch out for Vista that for gaming applications it keeps it from allocating virtual RAM for video which basically doubles what it needs. In other words if your video card is set up to use 512 M RAM Vista 'hides' another 512 M RAM through virtualization - if I read the article correctly.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105
or google kb940105 and see if you can find some useful info that may help with this problem

Agnat

[crenn]

According to that page, that hotfix is going to be included in Vista SP1

[Exley]

I've read many different things that said vista allocates its RAM very different from XP (in a good way). The gist that i got was vista knows that empty ram is a waste so the more RAM you have the more it uses.

I have also noticed from experience that vista does not empty ram unless it is necessary so, if you just did something that was ram intensive than it my still be sitting there until you need the space from something else. of course this is just speculation from watching the little RAM gadget i have.

[haha49]

its for caching.. i looked into this.. vista use more ram if its avalble for caching instead of useing the hardrive..