Project Reality Forums

Hi.

I just wanted to see if other people experience the same 'problem'.

I (personally) find it ridiculous that they would design an OS that uses over 1GB when doing nothing.

So tell me, how much ram are you using (I disabled xfire and other non-essentials)?

Of course when I say doing nothing - I mean me not performing any tasks (not that literally nothing is going on obviously).

It's basically prefetch and the like...

If yo uare using W7

go to the gadgets page and search up CPU/RAM usage gadgets...easy way gives it nice and simple

Win7 runs a lot of background processes, there are even a lot of 3rd party background processes being run. So if you wanted to reduce the usage get a program like game booster that will keep certain processes from running. If you want to reduce it even more go ahead and shut down the computer.

May new best friend... Resource Monitor has a Memory tab that will show the processes and the RAM they are using. You can even sort by it to figure out which processes eat up the most. But all in all I think the rediculous amout of used RAM when nothing is there is due to the thousand little services running.
All eating up just a little but but summing up to a big amount. I am seriously thinking about upgrading my laptop from 2GB to ... something better because of all the extreme loading times due to hard faults. I hate when that little HDD LED on my laptop just doesnt stop blinking, just because I am switching to Thunderbird, which is in the background but since I havent used it for 30min it was swapped into the page file.

tl;dr: I am having this issue as well, adding the suspicion that W7 likes to move programs from RAM to page file because they haven't been used for a while - trying to (unneccessarily) free up RAM for the possibility of new processes spawning. And having an ultra long delay in freeing up the RAM if a process is closed.

I'd too like to find a way to tweak how W7 does this memory management and set how I want it to behave instead of upgrading laptop RAM.

Aiee, this old chestnut.

Vista and W7 manage memory a little differently than XP and other legacy versions. Traditionally, programs would be loaded into memory when they were opened, and removed from memory when they weren't. So, if you had the bare-bones OS running with no other applications open in foreground or in background processes, you could see your RAM useage drop right down to a couple hundred megs.


Starting with Vista (but only really made as useful as it should be in 7), Windows now does things slightly differently. Over time, the OS recognises what programs you use regularly - do you load up Firefox every time you start your PC, are you always opening and closing MSN, thank kind of thing. These regular-use programs are then automatically fetched into the memory before the actual application is called for by the user. As Psyrus says, it's called "Prefetch" and that's exactly what it does; pre-emptively fetches what you're going to use.

The flipside of this is that when you look at your memory useage, you'll almost certainly have it pretty high - 1.5Gb useage at "idle" is fairly normal... but the point is, your PC's memory isn't actually idle at that point; it's already got most of your regular-use programs loaded in there for almost-instant startup.

When you then load a single application that needs all your system's memory resources - like a game, or when working with large multi-layer files in Photoshop, all the pre-fetched data is dropped from memory, because there's no point holding it if a) you're not using those applications and b) you actually need the memory for something else.



TLDR version: when your PC isn't being stressed and you have plenty of resources available, Windows will second-guess what you do with the machine and keep stuff ticking over in RAM for when you want it.

When your system is being pushed (ie, gaming), this stuff gets dropped from memory.



TLDRTLDR version: Quit stressing, your PC is smarter than you think.

Nice! One of the things that goes against the typical "windows 7 sucks" crowd.

Windows 7 is the best thing to come out of MS, full stop. It, like Vista, sucks if you're trying to run it on XP-era hardware but anyone on a rig built in the last 4-5 years should find it a major improvement.

I actually wrote out a huge sesponse to this and posted it but now I don't see it?

Anyway, thank you everybody for your hekp and explanations.