Ram Upgrade --> greater ram usage?

It seems that lately there are a lot of problems concerning memory and Vista, and here is my story. Not exactly a problem, but I am not sure how to interpret this...

After reading several posts about memory upgrades, I decided to equip my Asus G1S with new 2GB of RAM (under Vista 32x), resulting in a total of 3GB. I must say that games seem to run faster than before (apps not that much), which of course is very neat, but I noticed that while the computer is idle, Vista uses about 750MB, while before the upgrade (with only 2GB) it used about 450MB. So the upgrade resulted in a usage of 300MB more. I can't seem to find an explanation, since I didn't make any changes whatsoever that would excuse this kind of "raise". Is this behaviour normal, or should I be worried (more than now)?

 

Vista automatically uses a portion of your RAM to pre-load the programs it thinks you'll want to use. So the extra RAM usage is perfectly fine.

There are ways to disable that, but there really is no point.

 

Microsoft redesigned Vista's memory management to follow the motto "unused RAM is wasted RAM", a design idea that Linux has been using for a long time. Basically Vista caches dlls and program data that it thinks you will use (according to your user habits). It tries to use all available RAM, but when you need it, your needs will take priority; Vista will dump some of its cache to free memory for you applications if need be.

 

Wow, thanks for the quick replies! It's good to hear that, I can confirm that even with the raised usage under Vista, while playing games the ram usage is almost the same as before...

 

RAM management in Vista is much improved over XP's system.

 

Yes that's true.

And vista bashers continue to say it's worst but still...

How do you only had 450MB used? I have like 800MB on mine, my dad's laptop (with 1GB) is at 550 and my desktop (1.5) at 700

 

I disabled several processes that weren't needed, in total I ended up having 40-41 processes running in idle mode, of course after having read several guides, tweaks and more, in order to optimize performance. I myself was pretty annoyed, when after (clean-) installing Windows Vista I noticed the great difference in mem usage between XP & Vista (dual-boot system). There are several guides of this kind, even in this forum you can find some . All this, of course in the spirit of reducing mem, but after the upgrade, I ended up having the same usage... Nevertheless, very happy with the performance.

 

oddly enough - i just bumped up to 4gb ram with a vista ultimate 64-bit setup - it used to be that vista used 50% of my ram (with 2 gigs installed) - and now it shows to be using 25% (with the 4 gigs) - of course, this does fluctuate sometimes, but generally, it hovers around the 25% mark (so before / after the ram upgrade, vista looks to use about a constant 1 gig of ram at any given point)

 

Well, maybe 1GB is enough for your habits