vista and memory usage

davew · 20 May 2007 at 15:06

i'm new to vista, i've just bought a dell laptop with vista home premium, it's a core 2 duo 1.6mhz with 1gb ram ,even if the laptop is sitting idle the memory usage is at around 55% ,i installed wow on it last night and it ran like a dog and the memory usage is up to around 92% , i have noticed that there are a lot of processes running around 70 and there are a few programs that i don't need, dell diagnostic software and stuff like that ,do you think i've anything to gain by doing a fresh install or should i just remove the programs that i don't need.

Will_3rd · 20 May 2007 at 15:07

http://www.yorkspace.com/pc-de-crapifier/

TheVoice · 20 May 2007 at 15:12

When I bought my Dell notebook last year I cleared it out manually (although the app linked above looks pretty good) and it was a bit quicker. Did a clean install on it later in the year though and in all honesty, it was fair bit faster after that.

All depends on if you want the hassle of a clean install, then having to install drivers etc. Although it at least means you can install all the latest drivers out at the moment. It's what I'd do myself.

davew · 20 May 2007 at 15:52

i think i'll go for a clean install i may as well do it now as later as i've not got a lot installed on it yet, cheers

Dolph · 20 May 2007 at 16:12

You do realise Vista is designed to make use of ram that's there by pre-cacheing useful stuff rather than letting all that expensive ram sit there doing nothing, right?

Sure there are probably some crap on there, especially if it's chugging in applications (Vista will always dump cache stuff if needed), but don't expect a small memory footprint from software designed to utilise hardware.

masslac · 20 May 2007 at 16:33

Um, yeah. Using your hardware is not a bad thing. As the guy above said, it's simply RAM cacheing.

no_1_dave · 20 May 2007 at 17:10

If a program needs the memory vista will let it

Final8y · 20 May 2007 at 17:40

But 1GB ram is on the tight side.

gareth170 · 20 May 2007 at 18:45

no point having memory thats not doing anything....

Mud · 20 May 2007 at 18:53

For the record, Vista uses 50-75% of my 4GB just idling along.

davew · 20 May 2007 at 19:21

just finished my fresh install of vista and i've now only got 36 processes running and seems to be a lot quicker now, i think i'll upgrade the ram to 2gb should help things a bit, when i was installing vista it never asked me for a cd code and i've not had anything pop up asking me to register my copy.

gareth170 · 20 May 2007 at 19:59

Mud said:
For the record, Vista uses 50-75% of my 4GB just idling along.

i have 4gb too and vista uses between 25-50%...

Mud · 20 May 2007 at 21:21

gareth170 said:
i have 4gb too and vista uses between 25-50%...

Right now I'm at 48.8%...that's low for me and firefox is chewing on a large part of that. Really does vary, possibly down to multiple HDDs (including a network drive). Steam sometimes takes up a fair whack. I'm never as low as 25%, but it's a fresh install, I'm sure nothing is awry yet

Glaucus · 20 May 2007 at 22:18

clean install wont do much, as it'll install all the dell rubish, unless you got a real vista cd, in which case I would. Alll the dell stuff clogs the system up and is rubbish, same with there rubbish anti virus/firewall/media controls.

davew · 20 May 2007 at 23:14

AcidHell2 said:
clean install wont do much, as it'll install all the dell rubish, unless you got a real vista cd, in which case I would. Alll the dell stuff clogs the system up and is rubbish, same with there rubbish anti virus/firewall/media controls.

clean install has worked a treat, i got a vista cd and all the dell rubbish is on another

Relentless · 21 May 2007 at 00:30

Final8y said:
But 1GB ram is on the tight side.

+1

I think vista needs 2gb really if you are a gamer.

Claire Drew · 21 May 2007 at 09:26

I have just jumped from 1g to 2g and the difference in performance is very visable. I would recomend the memory upgrade. Clean all the start up applications this should help a little.

TheVoice · 21 May 2007 at 09:58

Relentless said:
+1

I think vista needs 2gb really if you are a gamer.

Agreed, but to be honest I'd sat that's the case in XP too.

something daft already!! · 21 May 2007 at 10:57

TheVoice said:
Agreed, but to be honest I'd sat that's the case in XP too.

If you plan to run newish games then 2 gb is not enough for Vista, I have to use 4 gb to get reasonable performance and less disk caching, for game such as Stalker or Quake 4.