Author Topic: Windows Vista/7/8 Memory Usage Madness  (Read 2272 times)

neo von retorch

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Windows Vista/7/8 Memory Usage Madness
« on: November 24, 2014, 02:33:05 PM »
I've been reading a handful of computer threads for fun and profit, and it reminded me that the other day I took note that my desktop, equipped with 4GB of RAM and running Windows 8.1, uses about 2GB of RAM after just turning it on. The other day, I stumbled on a photo I had taken of one of my Windows XP desktops. It was using a grand total of 139MB of RAM.

Is there any hope of getting RAM usage down on the newer Windows operating systems? Lately while working in Visual Studio 2013, and having Chrome open to test the web applications I'm building, the combined usage has been enough that it's popping up low memory warnings. Nonsense! Is there any way to avoid spending $45 for another 4GB of DDR2 by trimming down all this memory hogging?

Rangifer

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Re: Windows Vista/7/8 Memory Usage Madness
« Reply #1 on: November 24, 2014, 03:17:47 PM »
Microsoft changed their attitude about ram in windows 7/8. The new thought is that unused ram is wasted ram, ie. let's pre-load things we think you will use into ram. That way if you do use them they start up quicker, but if you load something else that needs the ram the system can just dump whatever it had preloaded.

Dodge

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Re: Windows Vista/7/8 Memory Usage Madness
« Reply #2 on: November 24, 2014, 03:27:50 PM »
Yup, Rangifer beat me to it. Unused ram is wasted ram. All the major operating systems work this way now.

I showed this to a friend yesterday. I have a Macbook with 16gb of ram. 15.99 of it was in use, with 4gb being used as "File Cache". I closed some programs, and the in use memory went down to 12gb, and after a few minutes had creeped back up to 15.99gb.

When I checked the file cache, it grew from 4gb to 8gb. It saw I had ram that wasn't being used, and loaded up the cache with data it thinks I use frequently, so if I need it again, it'll already be in ram.

Don't worry about it, your computer will run much faster this way.

neo von retorch

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Re: Windows Vista/7/8 Memory Usage Madness
« Reply #3 on: November 24, 2014, 05:15:54 PM »
Given that, why at 3GB of usage is it telling me "I'm low on memory?" Why not just release some of the "unused" RAM?