Ok, another 3 gb ram question

I have 3 gb of ram in my sony fz. I turned off my pagefile and everything works great. The question that I have is how come the system never uses more than 1.7 gb of ram regardless of what I do? It idles at about 800mb of ram and when I run photoshop cs3 it maxes out at 1.7gb from what my task manager shows. I have the ram set to max 1.7gb in photoshop which is 100%. Is this a good idea? I would like to use more ram for the system, up to about 2.5 gb if possible. It seems like I am wasting the extra gb of ram because it never gets used. How can I fix this?

 

You can't really change your user habits to use up extra RAM, but Vista's SuperFetch service should cache program data and prelinks using any RAM not used by the user. That is true, of course, of you have Vista.

 

I had about 50 pictures opened in photoshop, each one was about 60mb in size and still photoshop used 1.7 gb of memory since that is the max that it is allowed. What I am wondering is, shouldn't my vista OS use some ram also? If it does, how can I check and see how much it is using?

 

Vista does use RAM. Lots of it. The memory usage you see at an idle Vista desktop is how much the OS is using.

To the OP, I don't think you should worry about under-utilizing your memory. A lot of people get 3GB or 4GB and don't even use a third or a half of it. Removing the page file is not a bad if you have memory to burn, but trying to use it ALL up is not something you can just "fix", unless you want to intentionally do some extreme multitasking or some heavy gaming. Rather you should be glad you've got the memory to spare and a responsive system at that...

 

Hi.

when i had 4GB, Vista only saw 3070mb, but is the link below from crucial.com saying that more than 3070 is used? have a read!

http://www.crucial.com/uk/kb/answer.aspx?qid=4252

Regards

John.

 

It still says that only 3 gb is going to be used by the system and that the other 1 gb is reserved for other devices that have their own memory. In other words, If you install 4gb of ram, your OS can only use about 3gb. The rest is already allocated to system resources and cannot be accessed by the system.

 

So it is being used for something, it`s not just sitting their idle.

So it might be worth buying 4GB instead of 3GB?

Regards

John.

 

That's the OS memory address being allocated to system resources, not the physical RAM itself. Unless your "system resource" consumption is small and your OS is still able to address 3GB+ after those resources are addressed, it is not worth getting 4GB.

 

Hi.

On a slightley different subject

I have 2x1GB Crucial Rendition Memory, I have been to the crucial UK and US and cannot find and refrence to Rendition Memory.

As i want to add a 2GB to one of my 1GB sticks.

part number "RM12864AA667.8FE" my 1GB sticks

Thanks

John.

 

What?

You don't need to use the same make/brand/speed/size of memory. Just drop in any old 2GB DDR2 stick (preferably of the same speed and/or faster if you want to keep running at that speed) and it'll work...

 

No, My friend has the same laptop as I do, except he has the intel integrated x3100. He loaded 4gb into his laptop and it only sees 3070mb. I have the nvidia graphics card which uses 256mb of dedicated memory. I only loaded 3gb of ram into my system(2gb+1gb) and my system sees 3070mb. this means that sony has allocated 1gb of ram automatically to other system resources and that cannot be changed regardless of how much ram you have installed. For example, Dell has set aside about 500mb of ram for their systems so if you load 4gb of ram you will only see 3.5gb. I believe lenovo sets aside 768mb of ram for their systems. It all depends on the manufacturer and is a set value that cannot be changed.

 

I just wanted to know what settings I can change to maximize my ram usage for the laptop and when I use photoshop. This is not another "I installed 4gb of ram and my computer only sees 3gb" thread.

 

Overall memory usage is on the Task Manager Performance page. Vista itself needs a lot of space and it may keep some back for SuperFetch. It might also want to keep some free space if you have disabled the PageFile (which I would keep, but set to a fixed size of, say, 2GB). 1.7GB being used by one application is a lot and I don't know if the OS has a limit on the RAM in use by an individual program. Try re-enabling the PageFile.

John

 

This is completely FALSE, please stop saying it. That section of RAM cannot be used, as the address space is used by other parts of the hardware.

 

That because Vista does not load up the WHOLE program into memory. Just what you are using. I have forgotten how large photoshop is, but lets say it was 600mb large. No modern operating system will load it ALL into memory. That would take ages. It just loads up what you need into memory.

You truly won't be using take much memory if all you are loading several small pictures. Loading one large picture with the combined size of all those pictures will use up far more memory.

Vista actually has very good memory management compared to XP.