Vista and Ram Usage

I just installed Vista Home Premium on my a8jp. Everything is stock on this laptop, meaning 1gb of ram. I'm noticing that my ram usage, even when idling, is at 70% Is this normal at all? Or should I be getting more ram? Does anyone know any cost effective or even free solutions to this ram problem?

 

My understanding is Vista uses unused memory to cache frequently used data/applications much more aggressively then XP. This results in higher *reported* memory usage, but if an application needs the memory, it is freed and handed over.

So basically, you don't want to mess with it, it's one of the ways Vista tries to be 'faster' then XP.

 

That makes much more sense now! Thank Jumper. I recieved my D630 yesterday with Vista and noticed that it was using all but 50mb of my 2GB memory. The first thing I thought was, "Wow, Vista is sure a memory hog."

Is this caching similar to what Turbo Memory is suppose to accomplish?

 

The more memory you have the more it will use.

But its just using it when its unused, it lets go when its needed.

So think of it as barrowing ram space not stealing it, it does indeed make the OS faster and has no negative effects on anything.

 

If you haven't reformatted your laptop, then it sounds like it really is using 70% of the RAM; this does not include cached RAM. If you look in Task Manager, you'll see how much RAM is cached, used, and free.

 

It does make things a little bit slower. There is a time period between Vista letting go, the RAM clearing and the other program taking hold of it that is lag. This is evident in some older games (but not too old!) that were not at all coded to be used with Vista, or newer ones that were not optimised.

 

Wouldn't that drain a significant amount of battery life?

 

The difference between full RAM and empty (or low load) RAM is probably less than 1 percent of the battery life.

 

There is no difference, because physically the RAM has to be refreshed every clock cycle regardless of if a program actually has information stored there.

 

I didn't know that, but it makes a lot of sense. As a matter of fact, I don't know why I never learned that earlier...