Is my processor 64-bit?

[Corasik]

So? RAM is there to be utilized, I would be ****ed if they made Windows 7 use less than 0.5GB RAM only and everything felt sluggish. It's not the case though, superfetch works a treat and as soon as you hit a memory intensive app(s), you'll experience a drop in Windows 7 memory usage. Hard to understand, isn't it? Better example, run IntelBurnTest with maximum memory available and see how your free amount of ram increases

Yeah, I know if you use all the ram, windows swaps. wow, thats news.... Yes, if I use burntest/prime95 whatever to use all the ram, and push windows 7 os/drivers and services to swap, then yes, when you end the memory hog task, it shows a temporary reduced memory footprint.... But the performance of the computer will be dire until its got the OS back in ram again. After 10 mins or so, idle will be back to where it was after a normal bootup, and the PC will be fast again.

 

[Boozebeard]

God, i'm fed up with everyone saying ATLEAST 4GB for windows 7. I ran it with 2gb for 2 months playing games like bad company and I didn't notice any difference apart from slight micro stutter in some games. Also windows 7 will keep application information in memory after you close it so its faster to access next time. If it runs out of ram it will free up this space. So if you are running 4gb ram and it's saying 3gb is being used up the chances are there is a lot that would have been cleared out by now if you were only running 2gb.

Obviously 4gb is better but if you're just doing office work and web browsing then 2gb is fine.

 

[Mr Krugga]

Sorry, but with 2 almost identical computers, only difference was the ram (2GB V 6GB) and the 6GB computer gave a far better experience all round. 2GB just isnt enough imho for 64bit windows.

How does it have anything to do with what I said? I was referring to 4GB vs 6GB, people saying 4GB isn't enough for a 64-bit Win 7 are misinforming the public. There's a massive difference between 2GB and 4GB since 64-bit systems can apply over 2GB per process.

I have no problems with how much ram Windows grabs, as you say, superfetch works well (far better than the Vista attempt at it), its a good fast OS, if you have a reasonable computer.

And a reasonable PC would have 3-4GB of RAM. It's still a sweet-spot nowadays. Moreover 2GB seem to cope with 32-bit Win7 pretty well too, nuff said.

Yes, of course if you run a very large app, it will start to swap out large chunks of the OS(and services) to the pagefile, temporarily reducing the amount of used memory when you shutdown the app. The point is, if you have enough ram that Windows doesnt need to swap, it will perform so much better.

Nope, only problem is that Win7 will unload precache and use the resources for other tasks. Obviously the CPU usage is maxed out with IBT, that's why user experience is let down. Make sure to try a sleep state though and see what your real idle memory usage is like. It's still pretty high at 0.75GB, can be skimmed to a little over 0.5GB.