Dell e1705- Vista eating over 40% RAM!

First time post on notebookreview.com! Have been lurking for awhile and the forum has been a big help
System
Dell e1705
Duo Core 2
2gig Ram
Clean Vista Home Premium Install

OK heres the problem at idle my system has over 40% of RAM commited. Biggest offenders are svchost.exe over 70,000K between 4 different instances and sidebar.exe over 80,000k between 2 instances. Even when i close sidebar it continues to consume RAM.

I like Vista so far but would really like to get the RAM consumption down. Anybody know of any RAM managers or tweaks to Vista to get this way down? I know I can stop running AERO and such but would rather not.
Thanks in advance.
Jerod

 

Well Vista is designed to eat ram unfortunatly, the way it's set up is that it uses large quantities of memory to speed up the OS unlike XP.

Thus the recommended RAM for all versions of Vista is 1GB and for Vista Ultimate is 2GB.

It's normal for this to happen... though 40% is quite a bit for having 2GB RAM installed. The only thing you can do is to close things you aren't using such as the Sidebar and other memory intensive processes.

 

Mine is like 30% ram (2g)
The weird thing is that before I did the clean install, the ram consumption is like 20%~~~~ THe bloatwares actually save ram?

 

well i think deleting the bloatware might lower the ram consumption.....if you have any bloatware that is.

 

Yes, I thought so and that's one of my reasons to do a clean install.
But just after I did the clean vista (without installing any other program), the ram consumption jumps to 30%.

 

Don't worry about the RAM usage; Vista handles RAM differently than previous versions of Windows. It will always look like you are using a lot of RAM but in return everything is a lot faster b/c Vista stores stuff in RAM (somewhat like PDAs have done).

The result is that additonal RAM really makes a difference in Vista.

 

jerods, do u have a x1400 or a 7900gs? Mine is x1400 and I just checked the gpu information in the catalyst control center.

Memory Size 895 MB
Memory Type HyperMemory

Core Clock in MHz 432 MHz
Memory Clock in MHz 396 MHz

The memory size is 895MB which means about 770Mb of the 2g ram has been assigned to x1400. That explains it. Is there anyway I can change the hypermemory back to 256MB?

 

Its normal, there are a few things you can do such as disabling aero and running selective startup options. In the end performance will be roughly the same. If your system doesnt feel bogged down and programs arent behaving sluggishly, dont worry about it, the rules have changed slightly with vista, thats all.

 

That memory is dynamically allocated, it only draws from it when needed, when its not being used its free for system use. That said, 895 is a pretty high amount, my desktop has a total of 751(256 dedicated). I highly doubt any program will come close to using half that ram for video, the set number is just a maximum.

 

But why does the ram consumption increase after a clean installation?

 

I imagine Dell had some Vista services turned off that are turned on in a clean install. We would need to have a before and after cleanup comparison of the processes display to know for sure.

As to Aero, do not turn it off. Doing so will actually degrade performance and stability. Aero is offloading all of the eye candy to the GPU (so unless you are using integrated graphics it is not using a lot of RAM anyway) and as such it is faster and more stable.

It needs to be remembered that previous Windows experience on RAM use is out the window; Vista has a new memory model.

 

Fellas,
Thanks for the info. I had read about vista being a memory hog and that it uses RAM differently. My system is running fine so far...haven't ran any memory intensive programs yet though. The only thing that kind of bugs me is why don't the programs free up memory after I close them? Unless I restart the system the memory stays allocated. (sidebar is eating 140,000k and hasn't been on for 6hrs.) I know i can close it from task manager but that is a huge pain. Is this normal? I used to have a small application for XP that was a RAM optimizer and it would free up RAM when needed. Anybody seen anything like that for Vista?
Also what is svchost.exe? It has 15 instances running right now and I'm not doing anything but running Firefox??

Anyway thanks again
Jerod

BTW Andy_Tok I am running the x1400 vid card

 

I just read this. pretty neat explanation. Hope it'll help
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html

 

Disabling areo will not degrade performance and cause instability, areo is the eye candy, disabling it gives you a traditional 2D desktop, freeing up resources thus increasing overall system performance a tad. If areo were necesarry for stability, I doubt it would be omitted from the Basic version.

 

That is a pretty next explanation. Paul Thurotte has a good one as well at Winsupersite.

What we are seeing is SuperFetch at work.

jerods, Vista is holding the program in RAM in case you open it again. Basically, it is treating RAM like a giant cache, and you don't need a RAM optimizer (SuperFetch will dump stuff from RAM if you have enough things running at once to trigger it).

 

Disabling Aero will degrade stability (not drastically but it will). It is a lot more involved than eye candy, it actually changes where the UI is rendered.

This is a brief overview, there are others:

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_05.asp

 

Vista uses memory differently. It tries to make use of every byte of the memory to improve the performance. Vista will actually release the memory when needed otherwise it'll just use the ram as cache in case you want to run the same program again. Vista has actually changed the way of using memory and we probably need to think in a different way too .(I know it's bugging when you're just using Firefox and the free memory displayed on the task manager is like 6 MB . )

EDIT: OOps, Joelist is faster than me~

 

Andy, Thanks just got done ready. Makes better sense now. Hope it works as planned. Joe that does makes sense also. Just a little nervous about the clean install i did and the drivers that dell put out. seems like they weren't ready for Vista. I guess i will run a game and test out the RAM and superfetch usage.
As long as Vista works well to stream movies to my Xbox 360 i'm happy!

Glad I got on Vista early. Takes a while to get used to. I am sure it will continue to improve.
jerod

 

Intresting read, Thanks.