Legit Reviews

I just got Vista Home Premium the other day and I've noticed that it sux memory like nothing I've ever seen before. I turned off most of the apps that were running in the background, like the windows sidebar. and the only thing now that's running is the OS and Explorer (basically), and that alone is taking up 1/3 of my 2 gigs of RAM. Does anyone know what I can do to free up some RAM.

w00fd06 wrote:I just got Vista Home Premium the other day and I've noticed that it sux memory like nothing I've ever seen before. I turned off most of the apps that were running in the background, like the windows sidebar. and the only thing now that's running is the OS and Explorer (basically), and that alone is taking up 1/3 of my 2 gigs of RAM. Does anyone know what I can do to free up some RAM.

Why would you want to free up ram? If ram isn't being used, it's essentially wasted, and Vista is quite proficient at putting available ram to use.

If excess ram usage of a certain program is negatively impacting performance of something else, that's a different problem entirely...

That, and I havent seen a single application (games atleast) yet that takes up 2 gigs of ram.

Dont worry if it takes up ram on idle, use it up if youve got it!

Mine runs at nearly 1/2 of my 1 gig, so when I play BF2 I nearly hit 100%. Soon I will return my bad stick of ram and get it back up to 2 gigs!

Normally, I'll have other apps running, like media center, or MS PowerPoint, or "sidebar", I'm just wondering if there's any way to get the OS itself to not use so much RAM. So I can multi task, and not worry about the computer slowing down.

I have two laptops running Vista Home Premium - one sits at 55% while idle (of 2 GB) and the other at 48% while idle (of 1 GB.) I can still run Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Firefox, Scite, etc. all at once, and never have any problems with anything running slowly. As someone already pointed out - unused memory is wasted memory.

I have VISTA on single core AMD 3500+ with 4GB ...
It uses about 2.2GB when i have all appliaction runinng

I voted for WinXP since I've managed to upgrade most of my machines up to that level now.

As for OS-X, it too was a memory hog jumping up from OS-9.x from what I've heard talking with my Mac friends. However there are some good pluses for OS-X over the older ones. I'm not all that sure Vista is everything worth while to upgrade over WinXP at this time. Given some time, there will be other Vista OS packages down the road that could be more suitable to use.

Linx holds much promise, however, it's pieced mealed in a good way as long as you're savy enough to know how to run it.

If you go back even to Win98SE, it flys on a 3.0Ghz machine with only 1Gb RAM and uses very little memory. The networking, USB and user accounts are less desirable, but still doable with some added softwares.

im running vista business and have 4gb of ram. system is running about 600mb of ram at idle but the sweet spot for ram on vista is 4gb mine runs like a champ and vista seems to be a much more stable os than anything ive had in the past.

w00fd06 wrote:Normally, I'll have other apps running, like media center, or MS PowerPoint, or "sidebar", I'm just wondering if there's any way to get the OS itself to not use so much RAM. So I can multi task, and not worry about the computer slowing down.

if your running ddr2 the ram price is at an all time low, you can pick up 2gb of matched ram for roughly 100.00 at that price you can fill all the slots and not worry about slowing down your system over ram.

Not to worry, as was stated before "free RAM is wasted RAM". Vista uses "SuperFetch" to cache pieces of apps you frequently run to shorten subsequent load times.

We used to say the exact same thing about Windows XP when we compared it to Windows 2K.