question about vista's resources with satellite a135

Hello all, I made a post earlier in the week about my dad getting a new laptop from the company he works with, anyway he seems to be adjusting pretty well to vista. The only thing that bothers me is that it is always using 65% of total physical memory according to the task manager. The laptop came with 1gb of ram, the most important things I have open are msn messenger, nod32 antivirus, and windows sidebar with four gadgets (clock, picture slideshow, calendar, weather)

I removed a lot of crap that was installed, but maybe I didn't get everything?

Is there some sort of guide that can tell me what can I remove?
There are only 5 processes over 5k, iexplore.exe with 23k, dwm.exe (21k), messenger (10k), tcrdmain.exe (6k), explorer.exe (6k), there are like 10 more between 1k and 5k. The rest are under 1k. It says there are 76 processes.

Is vista that much of a resource hog?

Just in case you were wondering, it's a satellite a135-s4527
5400rpm 120gb hdd, 1 gb ram, t2080 @ 1.73ghz

 

Greetings,

I just bought the a135-s2386 over the weekend. I got rid of all the wildtangent programs, microsoft office trial versions (installed openoffice.org), the 10 in one antivirus software garbage, and google deskop. This made things a little faster. I also added 2x 1GB kingston pc4200 ram yesterday and that made a big difference. Also after changing the power plan settings (battery icon on task bar) to high performance I noticed another big performance improvement. Something to keep in mind with vista, vista itself is not a memory hog, it uses memory differently then xp used to. Vista caches as much as it can into memory, settings, and programs you use frequently so the next time they start faster (like Linux does). The system will get faster as you use it more. I've been using vista on my desktop system for a few weeks now and I can say that at first it seemed slow but after a few days things start to open quicker and were more responsive. I think its SuperFetch that helps with the speed up.. but it takes a few days till you see a speedup. Another way to speed up vista on the cheap would be to get a usb thumb/flash drive and use ReadyBoost. I hear the Corsair Voyager GT are the fastest to use for readyboost, Vista can only use upto 4GB for readyboost, the cost is about $25 for the 2GB and $50 for the 4GB on newegg.

Best regards,
Loxety

 

Thanks for the comments man, it isnt really that much of a bother, especially to my dad (he's coming from a weak ass celeron 600mhz desktop) but it was just weird to me how much memory was being used. I'll just monitor his usage in the next few weeks and see if I see any improvements.

 

Integrated video may be chewing 128-256MB of RAM. Not sure which model you have, but the S2386 uses main memory that is shared with the video....

 

Vista uses whatever you give it. If you throw in another Gig of RAM it will still use 60-70% of the memory.

Look at it this way, what is the point of having 1Gig of RAM if the system only ever uses 512MB. My system run's about 75% Memory usage all the time. It's quick/responsive and Vista will "give back" resources when you launch a game, or some other applications that requires more RAM.

I have a 4GB SD card and use 2GB for ready boost, I don't know how much that helps but I don't really have any complaints about the system speed. Startup and shutdown times are another matter...