RAM percentage

I have 4G of RAM with my new Gateway and was wondering what your percentage of RAM usage was. I put the gadget on my desktop that tells you what percentage your CPU and RAM are running at, and my RAM is usually around 35%, although I've seen it as high as 50%. Just wondering what the percentage should be with no other desktop programs (browser, Word, Excel, Pandora, etc) running.

Also, I want to take a shot at figuring out which programs on my laptop can be uninstalled. Would msconfig be the best way to figure out which programs run at startup, and if I posted them here, would someone be able to tell me which ones aren't necessary?

Thanks!

 

I force use of at least 80% of memory at all times. Unused memory is wasted memory! Windows can always unallocate memory for other programs when necessary.

 

Same here. I typically have 17-35 MB of free RAM when runing windows. I hate the idea of haveing paid for 4GB of RAM and not using but 1-2GB of it.

As to removing programs, uninstall is the best bet. Use msconfig as a last step

 

im at about 1gb free right now but that cause i just closed photoshop other wise its usually at around 50mb free.

 

Funny, I took a different approach and idle at 650mb used with 26 processes and 3ish gb free. I found keeping the os lighter, regardless of the claimed memory management features of vista and seven, has led to faster app launches. It also allows me to allocate nearly all 3gb of memory to photoshop, instead of less due to unnecessary windows features and services. Unnecessary of course for what I use, your mileage may vary.

 

Just to have windows running with my programs at start up it takes 30% of my 4 gigs or RAM, I don't think I ever use it all up even when playing video games. I have 8 Gigs of virtual memory (whatever that means) and it's loaded at 20%
Here's a pix =)
Glowfoto :: Photo Sharing

 

I'd like to know how you can force Windows superfetch (that's the right tech right?) to cache more programs into RAM.

 

Honestly i'm not sure how to force it to "fetch" specific programs, but when i'm actually operating my system (not just playing a game or something) i will have many many programs and files active when i'm streaming data from one format to another one. So these programs are used all of the time and after a very short time windows has just always preloaded them for me.

If you arent using most of your RAM, it might just be a usage thing. If you dont use most of what the computer can do it will never have a need to load your RAM for anything but running windows.

Ideally i would like to get another 2GB or RAM (i honestly dont think i could use 8 even multitasking heavily, but i might go that route anyway since the kits have fallen in price ALOT) but thats just because everynow and then I hit a point where i'm using about 500mb of the "virtual memory" and even on SSD's that is weak sauce compared to RAM

 

Can you tell me how to force use in WinXP? My family's slow WinXP computer has 1.5GB of ram but I never see more than 512MB being used. I know that it isn't using the ram effectively because when switching between users that are already logged on and when using the computer after just quitting a game it is really really slow. I even have it set to favor using ram for cache over programs, but that makes no difference.