Vista uses almost 2GB of my 4GB memory

Inazuma

Inazuma

Inazuma

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I've had this computer for about a year now and haven't really been bothered too much by this, till now when a new game seems to be limited by my RAM.

When Vista has finished starting up, it shows 40-45% usage of my 4GB ram. So what can I do to decrease this to say 25%?
 
It's meant to! Vista will prefetch the most commonly used programs into memory so they'll load faster, it's very clever, you know ;)

Linky

But if you want to 'waste/ leave your RAM unused' your RAM then you can disable it by going into services (type services.msc into the run bar) then right-click superfetch, select 'properties' and drop down the startup type and select 'disable'. :)

You may see a performance decrease in switching it off as your general day-to-day stuff will have to load from HDD, as opposed to RAM.
 
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When you say 2GB used up, how much of that is the Superfetch cache? Task manager will tell you under Physical memory > Cached
 
As the old adage goes: free RAM is wasted RAM. If a game needs more memory the OS will shift other stuff out to the pagefile to accomodate it. Please don't go down the route of using so-called 'memory optimisers'.
 
Ratbag said:
As the old adage goes: free RAM is wasted RAM. If a game needs more memory the OS will shift other stuff out to the pagefile to accomodate it. Please don't go down the route of using so-called 'memory optimisers'.
Click to expand...

Whilst I agree with the overall concept of the OS usually doing things best, using the pagefile does have quite a big performance hit, so you want to avoid that if possible.
 
Haha, no. If all I'm doing is surfing the web then vista can take as much as it wants. But if I'm using Photoshop or playing a game, I'd like a little more to be free.
So since you're telling me vista caches stuff when my own applications need more memory, then it's fine :)
 
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